Boris Mokrousov

Boris Mokrousov was born in Nizhny Novgorod in 1909 and died in 1968. A Russian composer trained in the Soviet tradition, he is above all associated with the song, a genre in which he achieved a popularity that he did not attain with large-scale forms.

He received private lessons from Viktor Belyi, Litinsky and Anatoly Alexandrov, and later entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied with Myaskovsky and graduated in 1936. Although on several occasions he turned to larger forms, such as the opera Chapayev (1942) or the operetta Roza vetrov (1947), his main output was the song, with more than sixty titles, among which Zavetnyy kamen' (1944) and Odinokaya garmon' (1947) stand out.

His melodies, with well-defined and easily memorable contours, draw on Russian peasant and urban folklore and on the romance. The songs from the film Svad'ba s pridanym also enjoyed enormous success. A distinctive feature of his method was to compose the music first and then fit the lyrics to a previously fixed theme. He received the USSR State Prize in 1948 and the title of Honoured Artist of the Chuvash ASSR in 1962.