(b Vladimir-na-Klyaz′me, 25 Nov 1856; d Dyud′kovo, 19 June 1915). Russian composer. At the Moscow Conservatory he studied with Nikolay Rubinstein (piano) and Tchaikovsky (composition), whose friend he became, giving the Moscow première of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no.1 (1875) and succeeding him as teacher at the conservatory (1878). He eventually became director (1885-9) though it was as a teacher that he had the greater influence (his pupils included Skryabin, Rakhmaninov and Glier). An eclectic and conservative at heart, he was early drawn to the music of Bach and the Renaissance contrapuntists; these studies, allied to his diligence in formal planning, gave him a compositional skill unsurpassed by his Russian contemporaries. His most successful works are the large-scale instrumental pieces, particularly the fluent sonata structures, as in the C minor Symphony (1898) and the First String Quintet (1901), where his craftsmanship and contrapuntalism lend uncommon precision and polish to the musical argument. But his unoriginality and rejection of the indigenous Russian tradition resulted in conventional melodies and wooden musical characterization, for example in his ambitious opera The Oresteia (1887-94). Apart from the important chamber works (11 string quartets, three quintets), Taneyev wrote choruses and many songs (some in Esperanto); his last work, the cantata At the Reading of a Psalm (1915), was acclaimed and considered by some his masterpiece. He wrote books on counterpoint and on canon.

Alexander Sergeyovich Taneyev (1850-1918), by profession a civil servant, unrelated to Sergey, was a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and composed operas, chamber and piano music and orchestral works including three symphonies.

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