Turning the pages back... September 20, 1876 (09/19/99)

Turning the pages back...

September 20, 1876

Yakiv Stepovy (né Yakymenko), who helped establish the Ukrainian "national school" of composition, had an older brother who also was very musically gifted. While an émigré in Paris, élite musical publishers such as Leduc and Rouart-Lerolle vied for the honor of issuing the elder sibling's compositions.

Fedir Yakymenko was born in the town of Pisky, just outside Kharkiv on September 20, 1876. At the age of 10 he was sent to the Russian imperial capital, St. Petersburg, to sing in the court kapelle.

Yakymenko studied piano under Mylii Balakirev and was in the same composition class at the St. Petersburg Conservatory as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (who later taught Yakiv, and who conducted the premiere of Fedir's concert overture in November 1899). He graduated in 1900, and in October of that year his "Fantasia" orchestral suite was conducted by Aleksandr Glazunov.

By now known as "Akimenko," he was lured to Georgia in 1901 to serve as director of the Tbilisi Music School, which he did for two years before decamping for Paris.

In 1903-1906 Yakymenko taught; worked on compositions such as his elegy for cello and piano (1903), sonata for violin and piano (1905) and various solo piano pieces; and established himself as a concert pianist.

In 1906 he decided to return to Kharkiv and spent a further eight years teaching and composing. He produced an opera (published in 1914) based on Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Ice Queen," and began contributing articles in musicology to the St. Petersburg-based journal Russkaya Muzikalnaya Gazeta. In the interim, he privately tutored one of this century's great composers, Igor Stravinsky, the first to offer the titan classes in composition.

In 1914 he was invited to join the faculty as a lecturer at his alma mater in St. Petersburg, and then remained in the city as civil war engulfed the former Russian empire, rising to the position of professor (from 1919).

In 1923 Yakymenko emigrated to Prague, where he became chairman of the Ukrainian Higher Pedagogical Institute's Music Department and counted Zynovii Lysko and Mykola Kolessa among his students. In 1926 he published a textbook on harmony. He also returned to performing as a concert pianist and began conducting choirs on tours throughout Western Europe. In 1928, he moved to France, where he divided his time between Paris and Nice.

He wrote more works for solo piano, two "Berceuses de Noël" (Christmas Lullabies) for violin and piano, as well as arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs and liturgical music. Yakymenko also composed lieder (recital pieces for solo voice), drawing inspiration from the lyrics of Oleksander Oles and Taras Shevchenko as well as the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov.

Fedir Yakymenko died in Paris on January 8, 1945.

Sources: "Yakymenko, Fedir" Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); "Iakymenko, Fedir" Dictionary of Ukrainian Composers (Lviv: Union of Ukrainian Composers, 1997).

| Home Page |