Georgy Catoire

Georgy Catoire was a Russian composer of French descent who flourished around the last turn of the century; his name was sometimes transliterated as Katuar. Almost entirely ignored in the twentieth century due to the West's infatuation with Russian modernism and Communism's parallel elevation of conservative nationalistic neo-Romanticism, he was a gifted composer in nineteenth-century forms and an influential pedagogue and theorist (among his students was Dmitri Kabalevsky). In the 1880s, under the spell of Wagner, he traveled to Germany for compositional study, and on his return to Russia became more identified with the cosmopolitan, European-oriented strain of Russian contemporary music than with the nationalism of Rimsky-Korsakov. He is especially noteworthy as a piano miniaturist whose works evocatively meld successive waves of influence from Chopin, Tchaikovsky, and Debussy into a personal whole.
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