Anna Yesipova

Anna Nikolayevna Yesipova (1851–1914) was a Russian pianist and influential music teacher. From 1871 to 1892 she lived mainly abroad, while frequently returning to give concerts in Russia; she toured triumphantly throughout Europe and the United States, becoming one of the best-known representatives of the Russian piano school internationally.

At the age of 13 she entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, studying first with Aleksandr Villuan, then (from 1865) with K. K. Fan-Ark, and from 1866 with Theodor Leschetizky, whom she later married as his second wife in 1880. She made a successful early debut in Salzburg in 1868, and on 2 November 1869 gave her first Saint Petersburg appearance, performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 under the conductor Eduard Napravnik. On 23 May 1871 she graduated from the conservatory with a gold medal, completing the full course with distinction in both her major subject and required disciplines.

From 1871 she toured extensively and was praised by critics for the ease and elegance of her playing and the singing tone of her instrument. Her repertoire included works by Chopin, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Beethoven, as well as salon and virtuoso pieces; in 1875 the critic A. S. Famitsyn singled out Chopin as her central specialty. Among her regular ensemble partners were Karl Davydov, Leopold Auer, and Aleksandr Verzhbilovich, and she also played four-hand piano with Anton Rubinstein.

After divorcing Leschetizky in 1892, Yesipova returned to Russia and became a professor of piano at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. An advocate of active finger technique, she quickly built a large studio: her class grew from twelve students at the start to forty-two within a few years. Her pupils included Leonid Kreutzer, Alexander Borovsky, Boris Zakharov, Sergei Prokofiev, and others; musicians such as Isidor Achron, Simon Barere, Maria Yudina, and Boris Fomin also studied with her. According to the pianist and historian Grigory Kogan, her two decades at the conservatory were a “golden age” of Russian piano education with a significant impact on world pianism.

Her son, Yevgeny Ivanovich Ilyin (1877–1915), was also a pianist and was married to his mother’s student Olga Kalantarova. Yesipova died in Saint Petersburg in 1914; she and her son were buried at the Nikolskoye Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra and were reinterred in 1948 in the “Necropolis of Masters of Arts,” where a sculptural composition by A. Argenti (created in 1900) was installed on the grave.

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