Konstantin Romanovich Eiges

Konstantin Romanovich Eiges (born in Bogodukhov, Kharkiv region, 1875; died in Moscow, 1950) was a Russian composer and pianist whose output, almost entirely for piano, belongs to the line of Russian tradition at the beginning of the twentieth century. His significance lies chiefly as a witness to the Moscow musical milieu, in which first-rank composer-pianists worked side by side.

He studied at the Moscow Conservatory from 1900 to 1905, with teachers including Ippolitov-Ivanov, Sergei Taneyev and Yarosevski. He then devoted himself to performing and teaching at the piano, and among his pupils was Stanchinski. He was one of the musicians who gathered in Pavel Lamm's Moscow flat during the 1910s and 1920s. Alongside his practical work, he also wrote about music: an article on Wagner published in 1913, and reminiscences of Rachmaninoff and Taneyev.

His pianistic writing is fluent and sensitive, and his style ranges from a naive, Schumann-rooted Romanticism, as in the Études-fantaisies, to a texture of cross-rhythms and elaborate polyphony, combined with opulent harmonies and melodies that recall the Rachmaninoff of his middle-to-late period. The two Sonata-poèmes are probably his finest works and may be counted among the most accomplished of the many single-movement sonatas written in Russia in the 1910s and 1920s.

His son, Oleg Konstantinovich Eiges (born in Moscow, 1905), was also a pianist and composer, author of fourteen piano sonatas, and studied with Petri in Berlin. Konstantin Eiges's legacy is thus bound up with a generation of Russian composer-pianists whose work retains interest for the piano repertoire and for its history.