Pancho Vladigerov

Pancho Haralanov Vladigerov (also spelled Wladigeroff, Wladigerow, Vladiguerov, or Vladigueroff; Bulgarian: Панчо Хараланов Владигеров; 13 March 1899 – 8 September 1978) was a Bulgarian composer, teacher, and pianist. He is widely considered the most important Bulgarian composer ever, and was among the first to blend Bulgarian folk music with classical traditions. A member of the so-called Second Generation of Bulgarian Composers, he helped found the Bulgarian Contemporary Music Society in 1933, which later became the Union of Bulgarian Composers. He also pioneered several genres in Bulgarian music, such as the violin sonata and the piano trio. As a teacher, he influenced nearly every major Bulgarian composer of the following generation, including Alexander Raichev, Alexander Yossifov, and Stefan Remenkov, as well as the pianist Alexis Weissenberg.

Vladigerov was born in Zürich, Switzerland, but grew up in Shumen, Bulgaria. His mother, Dr. Eliza Pasternak, was a Russian Jew; his father, Dr. Haralan Vladigerov, was a Bulgarian lawyer and politician. He began playing piano and composing as a child. After his father died in 1908, the family moved to Sofia in 1910, where Pancho studied composition with Dobri Hristov, the leading Bulgarian composer of the time. His maternal grandfather, Leon Pasternak—a Russian Jew who had left Odessa for Zürich—was a mathematician, amateur chess player, musician, and composer. He played violin with Pancho and his twin brother Lyuben, and a Jewish tune he taught Pancho later became the basis for Vladigerov’s 1951 symphony, the *Jewish Poem*, Opus 47. That work won the Dimitrov Prize in 1952, the highest Bulgarian state honor for an artist, and prompted Dmitri Shostakovich to say, “A work like this is written only once in a hundred years.”

In 1912, Vladigerov’s mother secured a government scholarship for her sons to study in Berlin. Pancho and Lyuben enrolled at the Staatliche Akademische Hochschule für Musik (now part of the Berlin University of the Arts). Pancho studied music theory and composition with Paul Juon, piano with Karl Heinrich Barth, and later piano with Leonid Kreutzer and composition with Friedrich Gernsheim and Georg Schumann. He graduated in 1920, having won the Mendelssohn Prize twice (1918 and 1920). After graduation, he became music director at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, working with director Max Reinhardt. In 1932, he returned to Sofia, where he became a professor of piano, chamber music, and composition at the State Academy of Music, which now bears his name.

His compositions span many forms: an opera (*Tsar Kaloyan*, with a libretto by Nikolai Liliev and Fani Popova-Mutafova), ballet, symphonic works, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, a string quartet, a trio for violin, cello, and piano, pieces and transcriptions for violin and piano, numerous solo piano works, 38 transcriptions of instrumental pieces for instrument and piano, 13 late transcriptions of his earlier works for two pianos, fifty folk song arrangements for voice and piano or orchestra, 20 songs for voice and piano, ten choral songs with piano or orchestra, and incidental music for theaters in Berlin, Vienna, and Sofia.

Vladigerov gained wide European recognition in the 1920s, when Universal Edition in Vienna published many of his works and Deutsche Grammophon released them on LPs. He toured most of Europe as a pianist and composer, performing mainly his own music. In 1969, he received the Herder Prize from the University of Vienna. The Bulgarian label Balkanton issued his stage and symphonic music in four boxed sets of seven LPs each, though only a small fraction of his output is available on CD today. His music was admired by Richard Strauss, Shostakovich, and Aram Khachaturian, and performed by artists such as Alexis Weissenberg, David Oistrakh, Emil Gilels, Ivan Drenikov, and more recently Marc-André Hamelin. Still, he remains little known outside Bulgaria. British-based Bulgarian pianist Valentina Seferinova has performed his solo piano works in UK concerts and continues to promote his music.

His most famous and frequently performed piece is the *Vardar Rhapsody*, also called the *Bulgarian Rhapsody*. Originally for violin and piano, it was later orchestrated and arranged for various instruments. Critics describe it as fiery and patriotic; one called it “the Bulgarian equivalent of Chopin’s Polonaise in A Major.” A substantial part of his orchestral, chamber, and piano music has been recorded by Bulgarian and international labels, including Balkanton, Naxos, Capriccio, and Bulgarian National Radio.