Nikolai Zaremba

Nikolai Ivanovich Zaremba (1821–1879) was a Russian music educator, theorist, and composer, best known for his teaching and administrative work in Saint Petersburg. He showed musical ability from childhood and during his school years was already improvising at the piano.

He graduated from the 3rd Saint Petersburg Gymnasium in 1840 and from the Imperial Saint Petersburg University in 1844, while also studying piano with Anton Gerke and cello with Johann Benjamin Gross. He later studied composition in Berlin with Adolf Bernhard Marx.

After returning to Saint Petersburg in 1854, Zaremba took charge of the Choral Society at the Lutheran Sts. Peter and Paul Church. In 1859 he began lecturing in classes established at the Russian Musical Society, and in 1862 he became professor of music theory at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He served as the conservatory’s director from 1867 to 1871, after which he lived abroad for some time.

Late in 1878 he suffered paralysis and died on 27 March (8 April) 1879. He was buried at the Volkovo Lutheran Cemetery in Saint Petersburg, and claims that his grave was lost are incorrect.

Zaremba’s surviving output as a composer is very small and was scarcely published or performed even during his lifetime. His works include the oratorio “John the Baptist”, a symphony (reported to have been performed with great success by a university student orchestra conducted by K. Schubert), a string quartet, and choral pieces.

His detailed “Instruction for the Saint Petersburg Conservatory” long served as the organizational foundation of the institution. Among his pupils were Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Vasily Safonov, Herman Laroche, Nikolai Solovyov, Ella Adaevskaya, Karl Zike, Ivan Pomazansky, Konstantin Galler, Andrey Kazbiryuk, Grigory Lvovsky, and others.

According to I. M. Yampolsky in the “Music Encyclopedia”, Zaremba was the first in Russia to teach music theory in the Russian language. His lectures were noted for vivid and expressive presentation, though his aesthetic views were conservative and he often framed theoretical statements in religious terms, a trait mocked by Modest Mussorgsky in “The Seminary”.

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