Yuri Shaporin

Yuri Alexandrovich Shaporin (Russian: Юрий (Георгий) Александрович Шапорин) (8 November [O.S.

His teachers there included Nikolay Sokolov (composition), Maximilian Steinberg (orchestration), and Nikolai Tcherepnin (conducting).

His opera Dekabristi (The Decembrists), to a libretto written by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy about the Decembrist revolt, had been on Shaporin's mind since 1920 — a 1925 interim version, Polina Gyobe, had two scenes staged in Leningrad (as it had been renamed in 1924).

That year, he completed a version of Dekabristi for a commission by the Bolshoi Theatre, but dissatisfied with it, he decided to revise it.

The opera was only completed in 1953, after collaboration with librettist Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky, and it was premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre on 23 June 1953.