This year 2024 marks the hundredth anniversary of Sergei Mikhailovich Lyapunov’s death, and is therefore a welcome opportunity for discovering, re-discovering, or at least disseminating and enjoying, the work of this great composer of late-Romantic Russia.

He was born in Yaroslavl, on November 18, 1859, to a refined and cultivated family. His father, Mikhail Vasilievich, was a scientist who specialized in astronomy and mathematics: Alexander, one of Sergei’s two brothers (the other was called Boris) would become in turn a celebrated mathematician, who is still remembered for his discovery of a particular mathematical function.

Their mother, Sofya Alexandrovna, was a proficient amateur pianist who gave the first musical instruction to her son Sergei, who had displayed unmistakable signs of musical talent at a very young age.

Unfortunately, Mikhail died when Sergei was just eight; thus, the family had to relocate in the larger city of Nizhny Novgorod. This, however, provided Sergei with opportunities which he would have hardly received in his birth city. Specifically, he could study, from 1873 to 1878, in Nizhny Novgorod, where a branch of the Russian Musical Society’s school had opened just recently. At 19, in 1878, Sergei was admitted to the prestigious Conservatory of Moscow, not least thanks to the recommendations provided by the great Nikolai Rubinstein, one of the most famous Russian musicians of the era who was also the Conservatory’s director. In Moscow, Lyapunov could complete his musical education under the guidance of leading musicians. He studied piano with two former pupils of Franz Liszt, i.e. Paul Pabst (1834-1897) and Karl Klindworth (1830-1916), and also with V. I. Wilborg. His teachers of composition were Nikolai Hubert (1840-1888), but especially Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) and a former student of Tchaikovsky himself, i.e. Sergei Taneyev (1856-1915).