When Prof. Karl Laux, in his day one of the German Democratic Republic’s most celebrated musicologists, was working on his book on music in Russia and the Soviet Union, he consigned a dozen or so assorted personalities to near-oblivion on a mere eight-and-a-half pages. One of these is Mikhail Mikhaylovich Ippolitov-Ivanov, who in 1922 was one of the first in the United Soviet Republics to be awarded the title of “people’s artist” and who had surely deserved better if only on account of his diversified oeuvre than an extended footnote – not to mention the achievements with which he had stamped his character upon Russian and Soviet culture as ethnographer and conductor, as teacher and organizer.
