Isaak Osipovich Dunayevsky (1900–1955) was a Soviet film composer and conductor of the 1930s and 1940s, who composed music for operetta and film comedies, frequently working with the film director Grigori Aleksandrov.
Dunaevskiy was born to a Jewish family in Lokhvytsia in the Poltava Governorate, Ukraine. He studied at the Kharkiv Musical School in 1910 where he studied violin. During this period he started to study the theory of music under Semyon Bogatyrev. He graduated in 1919 from the Kharkiv National Kotlyarevsky University of Arts. At first he was a violinist, the leader of the orchestra in Kharkov. Then he started a conducting career. In 1924, he went to Moscow to run the Theatre Hermitage. In 1929 he worked for the first time for a music hall (“To the icy place”) with the Moscow music hall. Later, he worked in Leningrad (1929–1941) as a director and conductor of the Saint Petersburg Music Hall (1929–34), and then moved to Moscow to work on his own operettas and film music.
He was one of the first composers in the Soviet Union to start using jazz. He wrote the music for three of the most important films of the pre-war Stalinist era, Jolly Fellows, Circus and the film said to be Stalin’s favorite film Volga-Volga, all directed by Grigori Aleksandrov.
In a reply to the British book The World of Music, he listed the following as his chief works: The Golden Valley operetta (1937), The Free Wind operetta (1947), and music to the films Circus (1935) and The Kuban Cossacks (1949).
He died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1955.
Dunaevskiy wrote 14 operettas, 3 ballets, 3 cantatas, 80 choruses, 80 songs and romances, music for 88 plays and 42 films, 43 compositions for light music orchestra and 12 for jazz orchestra, 17 melodeclamations, 52 compositions for symphony orchestra and 47 piano compositions and a string quartet.