Rodion Shchedrin, the renowned Russian composer known for ballets including Anna Karenina and Carmen Suite, has died in Germany at the age of 92, Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre announced on Friday.
Shchedrin and his wife, the legendary ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, were a dominant force in Soviet and Russian culture for much of the 20th century. They were married for 57 years until her death in 2015.
His body of work spanned choral music, concertos, opera and ballet, blending Russian folk influences with classical traditions and avant-garde techniques. His 1972 ballet Anna Karenina remains a staple for major theatres worldwide.
The Bolshoi Theatre, where Shchedrin worked for many years, hailed his “priceless creative legacy” in a statement, calling his death “a huge tragedy and an irreparable loss for the entire world of art”.
Born in Moscow in 1932 into a musical family, Shchedrin graduated from the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. He married Plisetskaya in 1958 and wrote several ballets for her, including The Seagull and The Lady With the Dog, based on works by Anton Chekhov.
Both faced controversy in the Soviet era. Plisetskaya was monitored by the KGB and temporarily banned from foreign travel. Shchedrin’s Carmen Suite was criticised by culture minister Ekaterina Furtseva, who called it crude, according to state news agency Tass. In 1973, Shchedrin succeeded Dmitri Shostakovich as president of the Union of Composers of Russia. From the late 1980s, he divided his time between Moscow, Munich and Switzerland.
