Biography
Vissarion Yakovlevich Shebalin (June 11 [O.S. May 29] 1902 – May 29, 1963) was a Soviet composer.
Shebalin was born in Omsk, where his parents were school teachers. He studied in the musical college in Omsk. He was 20 years old when, following the advice of his professor, he went to Moscow to show his first compositions to Reinhold Glière and Nikolai Myaskovsky. Both composers thought very highly of his compositions. Shebalin graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1928. His diploma work was the 1st Symphony, which the author dedicated to his professor Nikolai Myaskovsky. Many years later his fifth and last symphony was dedicated to Myaskovsky's memory.
In the 1920s Shebalin was a member of the Association for Contemporary Music (ACM); he was a participant of the informal circle of Moscow musicians known as "Lamm's group", which gathered in the apartment of Pavel Lamm, a professor from the Moscow Conservatory.
After graduating from Moscow Conservatory, he worked there as a professor, and in 1935 became also a head of the composition class at the Gnessin State Musical College. In the very difficult years of 1942-48 he was a director of the Moscow Conservatory and the art director of the Central Musical School in Moscow. He fell victim to the Zhdanov purge of artists in 1948 and fell into obscurity afterwards. Among his students were Lydia Auster, Edison Denisov, Grigory Frid, Tikhon Khrennikov, Karen Khachaturian, Aleksandra Pakhmutova, and others. Shebalin was one of the founders of and the chairman of the board (1941–1942) of the Union of Soviet Composers.
Shebalin was one of the most cultured and erudite composers of his generation; his serious intellectual style and a certain academic approach to composition make him close to Myaskovsky. In 1951, he was awarded the Stalin Prize. Shebalin was a close friend of Dmitri Shostakovich, who dedicated a string quartet (No. 2) to him.
In 1953, Shebalin suffered a stroke, followed by another stroke in 1959, which impaired most of his language capabilities. Despite that, just a few months before his death from a third stroke in 1963, he completed his fifth symphony, described by Shostakovich as "a brilliant creative work, filled with highest emotions, optimistic and full of life."
Shebalin died on May 29, 1963. He was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery near his professors and colleagues.
Shebalin composed in many musical genres. Among his creations are operas, symphonies, string quartets, trios and sonatas, choral music, romances, songs, music to dramas, radio plays, and movies. One of the most interesting works of Shebalin is his opera Ukroshcheniye stroptivoy (Укрощение строптивой – The Taming of the Shrew, after William Shakespeare) (1957). He wrote another opera Solntse nad stepyu (The Sun above the Steppe, 1958), and also the music comedy Zhenikh iz posolstva (The Bridegroom from the Embassy, (1942). He also completed the opera Sorochintsy Fair by Modest Mussorgsky in 1930, and reconstructed a long missing pas de deux from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake from a violin 'repetiteur' rediscovered in 1953.
