Meliton Balanchivadze

Meliton Balanchivadze (Georgian: მელიტონ ბალანჩივაძე) (December 24, 1862 – December 21, 1937) was a Georgian composer and one of the founders of Georgian classical music. Two of his children, George Balanchine and Andria Balanchivadze, had illustrious careers, the former as a pioneering choreographer in the United States, and the latter as Soviet Georgia's leading classical composer.

Career

Born in the village of Banoja and trained at the seminaries of Kutaisi and Tbilisi, Balanchivadze began an operatic career at the Tbilisi Opera House in 1880. In 1882, he founded a Georgian folk ensemble and organized the first ever folk concert in Tbilisi in the next year. From 1883 to 1886, he travelled to various parts of Georgia, collecting folk songs and training folk choirs. From 1889 to 1895, he studied at St. Petersburg Conservatory where one of his teachers was the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Between 1895 and 1917, he toured Russia giving concerts of Georgian folk music. After the 1917 Bolshevik coup, he returned to his native Georgia where he taught and composed. He is the author of the first original Georgian opera Tamar the Wily (თამარ ცბიერი)—first performed by Russian artists at the Hall of the Russian Nobility Council in 1897—as well as numerous choral works, as mass, and other church services.

Family

Balanchivadze was married twice. Of the first marriage, to Gayane Eristavi, he had two children. One of them, Apollon, was a colonel in the White Russian forces, notably serving in the Ice March of 1918. Meliton Balanchivadze later married (probably in 1905 or 1906) Maria Nikolayevna Vasilyeva, a St. Petersburg native. The couple had four children. Of them, Tamara, a painter, died during the blockade of Leningrad in 1943; Georgi emigrated to the United States and became an influential ballet choreographer; Andria became a leading composer in Soviet Georgia.