Anatoli Konstantinowitsch Ljadow – Анатолий Константинович Лядов, scientific transliteration Anatolij Konstantinovič Ljadov, also Anatoly Lyadov – (*1855 in St. Petersburg / †1914 Polinovka Estate/Novgorod) grew up motherless in a family of prestigious Russian musicians. His father – conductor at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg – gave him his first lessons before he began to study piano and violin at the St. Petersburg Conservatory as early as 1870. He had been influenced early on by the group of composers known as “The Five”: such as Modest Mussorgsky or Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. At the age of 23, Lyadov became a docent of harmony and later professor of composition at the Petersburg Conservatory, where Sergei Prokofiev and Nikolai Myaskovsky, among others, studied with him.
The patron and philanthropist Mitrofan Belyayev appointed him artistic director of the “Russian Symphony Concerts”, which he financed, and lector of his newly founded music publishing house, where Lyadov founded the “Second Petersburg School” with Alexander Glasunov, in succession to the “The Five”.

Although he worked almost exclusively in short forms (besides an unfinished opera and arrangements of Russian folk songs – a dozen small orchestral works, and around 100 piano miniatures, mostly in the national Russian style), Lyadov was highly respected by his elders and his peers. Early in his career, Mussorgsky described him as “a new, unmistakable, original and Russian young talent.” His oeuvre includes sixty-seven works with opus numbers and a good number of other works, and he was not always as idle as his reputation would suggest, but he was extremely critical of his own work. Perhaps for this reason he never completed any projects on a large scale, although he fashioned shorter pieces from some of the unfinished projects. Like many Romantics, and especially his mentor Rimsky-Korsakov, he was inspired by both nature and the supernatural, which he was able to bring to vivid musical life by the imaginative use of orchestral color. In this regard he once wrote, “My ideal is to find in art what is not on earth.” His mature pieces in this vein, such as the symphonic poems Baba Yaga, Kikimora, and The Enchanted Lake, could be considered examples of musical impressionism, although they are clearly more influenced by Rimsky-Korsakov than by Debussy.

Until the end, however, Lyadov remained a traditionalist, despite occasional excursions to the edge of major/minor tonality. His compositions captivate with sovereign mastery of the compositional craft as well as differentiated colorfulness, which sometimes even includes a tendency to the grotesque, and thus what remains of him is top-class late Romanticism.