Saint Petersburg Conservatory

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Theatre Square and the conservatory in 1913.

The St Petersburg Conservatory (Санкт-Петербургская консерватория in Russian; Sankt-Peterburgskaya konservatoriya in transliteration) is a music school in Saint Petersburg. Its full name is the St Petersburg State Conservatory named after N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov (Санкт-Петербургская государственная консерватория имени Н.А. Римского-Корсакова). It was formerly known as the Petrograd Conservatory (Петроградская консерватория) and the Leningrad Conservatory (Ленинградская консерватория).

The conservatory was founded in 1861 by the Russian pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein. On his retirement in 1867, he was succeeded by Nikolai Zaremba.

The current building was erected in the 1890s on the site of the old Bolshoi Theatre of Saint Petersburg and still preserves a grand staircase and landing from that historic theatre. Rimsky-Korsakov joined the faculty in 1871 and the conservatory has borne his name since 1944.

As a centre of a Russian school of composition (along with the Moscow Conservatory, founded a little later), its graduates have included such notable composers as Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, George Balanchine, Artur Kapp and Rudolf Tobias. During the 1960s Shostakovich taught at the Conservatory: amongst his pupils were German Okunev and Boris Tishchenko.

In 2004, the conservatory had around 275 members of staff and 1,400 students.