Matvei Blanter

Matvey Blanter (1903–1990) was a Soviet composer, and one of the most prominent composers of popular songs and film music in the Soviet Union. He studied piano and violin at the Kursk Higher Music School. From 1917 to 1919, he continued his education in Moscow, studying violin and composition. Blanter's first songs were composed in the 1920s. At the time, he wrote light dance and jazz music. In the 1930s, as Soviet culture grew more ideologically strict, Blanter shifted toward writing Soviet propaganda songs. He emerged as one of the creators of the Soviet "mass song". In 1938, Blanter began his long-lasting collaboration with the poet Mikhail Isakovsky. Their first song, undoubtedly the most famous of Blanter's works, was the world-renowned Katyusha. He wrote several other highly popular wartime songs. His 1945 song, The Enemy Burned Down His Home, about a soldier who returns from the front to find his entire family dead, became controversial when the authorities deemed it too pessimistic and banned its performance; it was performed for the first time in 1961. Blanter's postwar songs include The Migratory Birds Are Flying (1949), a patriotic Soviet song in which the narrator watches migratory birds fly away and asserts that he can think of no better place to be than the Motherland, and Dark-Eyed Cossack Girl, written especially for the bass-baritone Leonid Kharitonov. He was active as a composer until 1975, producing more than two thousand songs.