1879–1951 · Russia, United Kingdom
Nikolai Medtner (1880–1951) was a Russian composer and pianist who graduated from the Moscow Conservatory with the Great Gold Medal. Almost all his works are written for piano: sonatas, concertos and short pieces called "Tales". For a player he is worth discovering as a master of clearly structured, deeply pianistic late-Romantic music.
Nikolai Medtner was born on 5 January 1880 (24 December 1879 Old Style) in Moscow. His father's ancestors came from Denmark, and his mother's side from Sweden and Germany, though the family had already lived in Russia for many years by then. Among his distant relatives on one line were the opera singers Friedrich Albert and Maria Hedwig Gebhard, who performed on the Moscow and St Petersburg stages in the early nineteenth century.
The boy's mother began teaching him piano at the age of six, and his next teacher was his uncle Fyodor Goedicke — father of the future composer Alexander Goedicke. In 1892 Medtner became a student at the Moscow Conservatory: his teachers were Anatoly Galli, Paul Pabst, Vasily Sapelnikov and Vasily Safonov, and he graduated from the conservatory in 1900 with the Great Gold Medal. Medtner taught himself composition, though as a student he managed to take a few lessons in theory from Nikolai Kashkin and in harmony from Anton Arensky.
Soon after graduating from the conservatory, Medtner tried his hand at the Rubinstein piano competition and earned an honourable mention from the jury, but on the advice of Sergei Taneyev and his elder brother Emil he chose composing over the concert stage, from then on performing in public only occasionally, mostly his own works. In 1903 several of his compositions were published for the first time. His Sonata in F minor drew the attention of the Polish pianist Josef Hofmann, and the young composer's music was also noticed by Sergei Rachmaninoff, who later became one of his closest friends.
His concerts in Germany in 1904–1905 and 1907 made little impression on the critics there, while at home, especially in Moscow, Medtner gathered many admirers. Real recognition came to him in 1909: the Glinka Prize was awarded for a song cycle on poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Some of these songs were first performed by Valentina Filosofova, daughter of General Dmitri Filosofov.
Medtner took part in the work of the Moscow "House of Song", and later became a professor of the piano class at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1916 the composer received a second Glinka Prize, this time for his piano sonatas. He served on the council of the Russian Musical Publishing House, founded in 1909 by Sergei Koussevitzky; his fellow council members included Alexander Goedicke, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin (later succeeded by Alexander Ossovsky) and Nikolai Struve.
In 1921 Medtner and his wife moved to Germany, but the public there took little interest in his music, and concert offers were scarce. Rachmaninoff helped him financially, arranging a concert tour of the United States for the pianist in 1924–1925. On returning to Europe, Medtner settled in Paris, but there too his works met with little success, and his friends were mostly Russian émigrés; among the few French musicians who valued his music was Marcel Dupré.
In 1927 Medtner performed in Soviet Russia, and a year later in Britain, where he was made an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music and successfully played his own Second Concerto with the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society. Such a warm reception later prompted him to settle in London. The following North American tour of 1929–1930 turned into trouble: the concert agency organising it went bankrupt, and once again it was Rachmaninoff who helped Medtner avoid financial hardship.
By the early 1930s, watching where contemporary compositional technique was heading, Medtner decided to set out his own views on art in print — views that many of his contemporaries found excessively conservative. In his book The Muse and the Fashion, published in Paris in 1935, he wrote about the immutable laws of art and argued that fashionable modernist trends in music merely tore apart the connection between a musician's soul and his work.
In October 1935 Medtner and his wife finally moved to London. Concert fees, private lessons and a contract with a German publisher let them live comfortably, until the outbreak of the Second World War forced the Medtners to move to Warwickshire, where they were taken in by the family of the pianist Edna Iles. In 1942 the composer suffered a heart attack, but by February 1944 he was able to perform his new work, the Third Concerto, at the Royal Albert Hall.
Illness did not stop Medtner's last years from being eventful. In 1946 one of the Indian maharajahs provided funds to found a Medtner Society, and in the years that followed the pianist managed to record almost all his major works — recordings that became part of the golden treasury of world musical culture. Medtner died on 13 November 1951; he is buried in London at Hendon Cemetery.
In 1959–1963 a twelve-volume collected edition of the composer's works was published in Moscow. In 2006 the pianist Boris Berezovsky founded the International Nikolai Medtner Festival, held in 2006 and 2007 in several Russian cities: Yekaterinburg, Vladimir and Moscow. And in 2016 the pianist Anastasia Mazankina founded the International Nikolai Medtner Memorial competition in St Petersburg.
Medtner is called one of the last Romantic composers: he holds an important place in Russian music alongside Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. The Russian melodic spirit in his music combines with western structural rigour — clear sonata form and masterly polyphony — while his harmony, for all its richness, stays within the bounds established in the nineteenth century: unlike many of his contemporaries, Medtner was never drawn to the modernist trends of his time. The piano is present in every one of his works without exception, and in his vocal music the piano part is sometimes no less important than the voice. Medtner was himself a first-rate pianist who knew exactly what the piano could do: his works are technically very demanding for the performer.
Medtner's three piano concertos are his only works with orchestra; they remain popular with performers and listeners today, especially the First. Fourteen piano sonatas hold a special place in his output — from the short one-movement sonatas of the "Triad" to the large-scale Sonata in E minor, Op. 25 No. 2. Among his solo piano works, thirty-eight miniatures that he himself called "Fairy Tales" stand out. His chamber music includes three violin sonatas, a few short pieces for the same pairing, and a piano quintet. And in his vocal work there are over a hundred songs and romances on poems by Pushkin and Goethe, in which the piano matters to the music almost as much as the voice.
The site's catalogue holds 66 editions of Medtner's music, most of them for solo piano: sonatas and cycles of miniatures ("Forgotten Melodies", "Fairy Tales" and other "Tales"). There are also piano-duet arrangements of the First and Third concertos, pieces for violin and piano (Op. 16), and one choral work (Op. 49); all of them are listed on the site at upper intermediate level. A good place to start is with pieces from the "Forgotten Melodies" cycle: Danza Graciosa and Danza Festiva from Op. 38, and individual numbers from Op. 39 and 40.