Pavel Pabst

Pabst was born Christian Georg Paul Pabst (Христиан Георг Пауль Пабст) in 1854, into a family of musicians in the capital of East Prussia, Königsberg (now Kaliningrad).[1] He studied piano with his father and then in Vienna with Anton Door and in Weimar with Franz Liszt.[2] The young Pabst had a fortuitous meeting with Anton Rubinstein when he travelled to Königsberg as overseer of cultural programmes there.

Pabst moved to Riga, then in the Russian Empire, as an accomplished pianist in 1875.[1] In the autumn of 1878 he accepted an invitation from Nikolai Rubinstein to teach at the Moscow Imperial Conservatory.[1] In Russia he was known as Pavel Pabst.[1] He was appointed Professor of Piano at the Conservatory in 1881 after Rubinstein's death, and taught there for the rest of his life.[1][2] Amongst his pupils were Sergei Lyapunov, Nikolai Medtner and Alexander Goldenweiser.[2]

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky frequently attended concerts given by Pabst, and used to refer to Pavel, as he was then known, as "a pianist of divine elegance", and "a pianist from God". In 1884, Tchaikovsky appointed Pabst to edit his piano works for publication.[2]

Pabst's students carried the great tradition of Russian romanticism into the 20th century. Pabst was considered one of the greatest pianists of his day, admired even by the great Franz Liszt. He and the young Sergei Rachmaninoff performed many concerts together. Until 2005 Pabst was known as a composer only for his piano transcriptions of the music for the ballet and opera by Tchaikovsky. He also played the piano concerto by Anton Arensky, and was the soloist at its premiere. Pabst's piano transcriptions were admired by the most outstanding pianists of the time, and were considered to be on a par with those by Liszt himself.

Paul Pabst died suddenly in 1897 in Moscow and was buried at Vvedenskoye Cemetery. His funeral wreath from the Russian Musical Society contained the epitaph: "To Honored Artist - Indefatigable Professor - Hardly simply a man".[1]

Marston Records[3] has issued, as part of its CD set "The Dawn of Recording: The Julius Block Cylinders," more than 26 minutes of recordings of Paul Pabst as a performer, both on solo piano and as part of a piano duet (with Sergei Taneyev). These are the only known recordings of Pabst as a performer, and were made in 1892 and 1895. They include music by Chopin and Schumann, parts of Arensky's Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos, Op. 23, and Pabst's arrangements of music by Chopin and Tchaikovsky, as well as a composition by Pabst.

• paul-pabst.com website
• Free scores by Pavel Pabst at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)