Nikolai Lopatnikoff

Nikolai Lopatnikoff (born Russian, Николай Львович Лопатников/Nikolai Lwowitsch Lopatnikow; 16 March 1903 in Tallinn - 7 October 1976 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) was a Russian-American composer, music teacher and university lecturer. He composed some works of the neoclassical music. These pieces featured fast, furious Allegro molto that included in some cases snare drumming and also soft music for cello. These style alternate fast and furious with quiet and solemn, legato strings giving way to a quiet passage that ends with a loud drum.

Lopatnikoff studied music theory and piano at the Conservatory of St. Petersburg, until he fled the Russian Revolution with his family in 1917, landing in Helsinki, Finland. He continued his studies at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki until 1920.

By 1921 his family had settled in Heidelberg, Germany where he began studying engineering at the University of Karlsruhe (Technischen Hochschule Karlsruhe), graduating in 1927. At the same time he was studying composition with Ernst Toch, Hermann Grabner and Willi Rehberg at the conservatory in Mannheim (Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Mannheim) and also in Berlin.

During this time, he composed the Piano Concerto No. 1 Op. 5, the 2nd Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 15 and Symphony No. 1, Op. 12. This symphony was performed by many orchestras in Europe and the USA and in 1932 by the Philadelphia Orchestra played on tour. For the "German Chamber Music Baden-Baden 1927", a follow-up event of the Donaueschingen Music Days 1926, he composed as well as George Antheil pieces for mechanical piano "Welte-Mignon". Aaron Copland, who heard this performance on 16 July 1927, acquainted Sergei Koussevitzky aware of it and so initiated a contact that would be decisive for Lopatnikoff's future. Koussevitzky engaged Lopatnikoff to orchestrate the pieces and offered cooperation. As a result, a long-standing connection between the two came about, which led to the premier of numerous Lopatnikoff works by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

After working in the 1930s in Berlin, and beginning 1936 in London, mainly as a composer, he emigrated to the United States in 1939. He served as a professor of composition at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut, the Westchester Conservatory of Music in White Plains, New York and ultimately at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1944 he became an American citizen. He taught music theory and composition at Carnegie Mellon until his retirement in 1969. He died at his home in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh in 1976. He and his wife, poet Sara Henderson Hay, are buried at Pittsburgh's Homewood Cemetery.

His archive is located in the Library of Congress.