Mr. Shchedrin drew on Russian literature for stage works and was an eager experimenter, inspired by folk tales, religious mysticism and melodrama.
Rodion Shchedrin, a leading Russian composer of the post-Stalinist era whose prolific output included operas, ballets, concertos and symphonies that became staples of the Moscow and St. Petersburg music stages, has died. He was 92.
The Bolshoi Theatre announced his death in a message on its Telegram channel. It did not say how he died or when.
He and his wife, the great ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, reigned as Russian cultural icons during the second half of the 20th century. At home, Mr. Shchedrin was championed by leading conductors including Valery Gergiev, artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater. Abroad, his works were promoted by exiled Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and conductor Lorin Maazel.
Western critics gave Mr. Shchedrin (shu-deh-REEN) mixed reviews, sometimes applauding his deft transformation of Russian classic novels into operas and ballets, and at other times disparaging some of his works as dull and trite.
Throughout his long career, Mr. Shchedrin displayed an eagerness to experiment. His earlier work, inspired by his love of Russian folk tales, was colorfully orchestrated and had a tonal quality that owed a debt to Sergei Prokofiev, whom he deeply admired. Russian Orthodox mysticism, melodrama, brooding orchestrations, neo-Romantic tonality and chromaticism all found a place in his sound world.
In his later music, Mr. Shchedrin sometimes used serial techniques that recalled Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone compositions.
But Mr. Shchedrin eschewed novelty for the sake of it.
"It's not so difficult to be new," he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2002. "To be long-lasting and interesting to future generations, this is difficult."
Despite his accomplishments, Mr. Shchedrin was forced to walk a political tightrope during the Soviet era. He and Ms. Plisetskaya were permanently shadowed by the K.G.B. During the height of her dance career, his wife was not permitted to perform abroad. And cultural ministry officials prevented the staging of some of Mr. Shchedrin's music as too unorthodox or controversial.
As part of that balancing act, he was also chairman of the Composers Union of the Russian Federation, the government's official sanctioning body, from 1973 to 1990. Mr. Shchedrin, who was not a member of the Communist Party, maintained that the post was more honorary than administrative, and said the organization provided vital support for composers.
But after the end of the Soviet regime, Mr. Shchedrin's reputation reached new heights at home. Interest in his music abroad surged, although many critics outside of Russia ranked him below two great contemporaries, Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke.
Rodion Konstantinovich Shchedrin was born in Moscow on Dec. 16, 1932. His father, Konstantin, was a composer and teacher of musical theory; his mother Concordia worked as a financial administrator at the Bolshoi Theatre. Growing up in wartime Moscow, their son voraciously read the works of Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Nabokov; later made their writings the basis of some operas and ballets.
The young Shchedrin was also strongly influenced by his frequent stays in the Russian heartland 100 miles south of Moscow near his father's native village where his grandfather was an Orthodox priest. Peasant folk tales became the subjects of several of Mr. Shchedrin's most important compositions.
A rowdy, sometimes violent youngster, Rodion was expelled from Moscow's prestigious Central Music School for slashing a fellow student -- a cellist -- with a razor blade. His father managed to enroll him in another leading music academy, the Moscow Choral Institute. Besides taking voice lessons, the boy composed pieces that caught the attention of Aram Khachaturian, the famed composer and pianist, who helped him gain entry to the Moscow Conservatory in 1950. His only complaint was having to attend lectures by a Communist hack on Marxist theory and how it related to music. Mr. Shchedrin recalled the teacher's dictum: "Music is created by the people. The composer merely arranges it."
The more talented students, like Mr. Shchedrin, gravitated toward two great Russian composers -- Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich -- who had fallen out of favor with the longtime dictator, Josef Stalin, and his successors. "Every note that came fresh from their pens was seized on with interest," wrote Mr. Shchedrin in his "Autobiographical Memories," published in 2012. "No threatening blasts of criticism could dampen our enthusiasm one whit."
He took pride that nobody in his family joined the Communist Party. Indeed, his father, a pianist, was banned for months from performing in public for advancing opinions on music that were contrary to party orthodoxy.
Already a rising star in Moscow's classical music scene, the younger Shchedrin fell in love with Ms. Plisetskaya; but was warned by a party official that the relationship might jeopardize his career. The ballerina came from a family labeled as dissidents. Her father was executed on Stalin's orders and her mother sent into Siberian exile.
The couple married anyway and were forced to tolerate permanent surveillance by the K.G.B., including listening devices in their apartment. A transcript of Ms. Plisetskaya cursing the secret police while in bed with her husband was printed in a Soviet newspaper. For years, Ms. Plisetskaya was prevented from joining the Bolshoi Ballet on its tours abroad. And performances of some of her husband's compositions were inexplicably delayed.
But Mr. Shchedrin readily admitted in his memoirs that he enjoyed a life of privilege compared to lesser-known artists and ordinary citizens.
Despite the government pressure, the couple went on to achieve stardom. The world-famous ballerina overshadowed her husband; as he noted in his autobiography: "It is not an easy life being Maya Plisetskaya. Nor is it a simple matter to be Maya Plisetskaya's husband."
He was devoted, creating ballets for her such as "Carmen Suite" (1967), a re-orchestration of Bizet's music, and "Anna Karenina" (1971). Though both works eventually became fixtures in the repertories of the Bolshoi and Mariinsky ballets, the Culture Ministry forbade performances of "Carmen Suite" for years, calling it "an outrage perpetrated on Bizet's masterpiece." Many Russian balletomanes agreed with Mr. Shchedrin's own explanation for the ban: "Soviet power was deathly afraid of sex."
Mr. Shchedrin was an inexhaustible composer and an acclaimed concert pianist. Besides his five ballets, his works included five operas -- "Dead Souls" (1976), based on Gogol's great novel, being the most renowned; 33 orchestral pieces including the often played Concerto for Orchestra No. 1 "Naughty Limericks" (1963) and "Old Russian Circus Music" (1989), both drawing on his love of folk music; 16 solo instrument concertos; 24 chamber music pieces; 31 compositions for solo instruments many of them piano pieces originally performed by Mr. Shchedrin; 20 vocal music works; and 16 scores for films and plays.
In the late 1980s, political liberalization known as perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachev proved a boon to Mr. Shchedrin's career abroad. In 1987, Sarah Caldwell conductor of Boston Opera Company invited him to performances of his "Dead Souls." And his wife introduced Boston audiences to four of his ballets -- "Anna Karenina," "Carmen Suite," "The Seagull" (1979) and "The Lady and the Lap Dog" (1985).
Opportunities abroad for Mr. Shchedrin accelerated after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. His close friend Mr.Rostropovich commissioned Mr.Shchedrin to compose the opera "Lolita" (1993) based on Nabokov's novel and conducted its premiere at Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm.
In 2002, Mr.Maazel music director of New York Philharmonic commissioned Mr.Shchedrin to compose a full-length opera for concert stage "The Enchanted Wanderer," drawn from 19th-century novel by Nikolai Leskov about misbehaving monk recounting his sins.
Although Mr.Shchedrin was highly praised by Russian and foreign colleagues, Western critics could be less enthusiastic. In a 2015 review of a Brooklyn Academy of Music performance, Times critic Corinna da Fonseca‑Wollheim dismissed "The Enchanted Wanderer" as "lugubrious, clichéd and dull."
In successive reviews of Shchedrin ballets performed by Mariinsky Ballet at Metropolitan Opera House in July 2011, Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay applauded "The Little Humpbacked Horse" (1956) as "positively frolicsome, fresh as a daisy, endearingly friendly," but declared "Anna Karenina" as "a complete waste of everybody's time."
Back in Russia as he neared the end of his life Mr.Shchedrin climbed ever higher in the estimation of his colleagues and public.Even after the death of Ms.Plisetskaya in 2015 he continued to give piano recitals.Russia's foremost conductor Mr.Gergiev organized a four-day music festival in Moscow honoring Mr.Shchedrin in December 2017.
Following the collapse of the Soviet regime Mr.Shchedrin and Ms.Plisetskaya chose to live mostly in Munich.But whatever resentments he had about the repression that he and his wife endured during the Communist era appeared to recede.
"I am happy to have spent my life in music," he wrote at the end of his memoirs. "And happy that I was born in Russia to do so."