On May 31, an envelope with a commemorative stamp dedicated to the 150th Birth Anniversary of music personality and educator Elena Gnesina was put into postal circulation

Elena Gnesina (1874-1967) was a pianist, the founder and the eternal head of a complex of educational institutions named after the Gnesins, an Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1925), and an Honored Art Worker of the RSFSR (1935), a professor (1943). She was one of the Gnesin sisters who created a multi-stage system of musical education (school, college, university).

Elena Gnesina was born on May 18 (30) of 1874 in Rostov-on-Don. She graduated from gymnasium, then from the Moscow Conservatoire in piano class under Vasily Safonov. Among her teachers were also A. Arensky and S. Taneyev. In February 1895, with her sisters Evgenia and Maria, she established a music school, which later became the Gnesin Music College and the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music. She was the director, the artistic director and the professor of the school and, since 1944, of the Gnesin State Music and Pedagogical Institute, which embraced all the elements of musicians' training and the largest number of specialties among the musical educational institutions of the country. E. Gnesina's activities were extraordinarily broad and wide-ranging. As a teacher pianist, she gave concerts, taught pupils of all ages; she created a large educational repertoire as a composer and the author of pieces for children. Being an extremely enterprising and energetic leader, she was constantly striving for the growth and improvement of the quality of education in the institutions she created, and for the construction of a large number of buildings in Moscow for their needs, which was unprecedented for artistic institutions. She held the piano class, as well as the methodology of piano teaching. She is the author of The Piano Alphabet and other educational and methodological literature.

Elena Gnesina developed the best traditions of the Russian piano school. Among her famous pupils, there were pianist L. Oborin, composer A. Khachaturian, conductor E. Svetlanov, and conductor G. Rozhdestvensky.

Gnesina received numerous state awards, including two Orders of Lenin (1945, 1954), two Orders of the Red Banner of Labor (1937, 1964) and medals.

The commemorative stamp features a portrait of Elena Gnesina against the music-sheet of her piece; the main illustration shows a monument to E. Gnesina and the buildings of the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music and the Gnesin Music College.

In addition to the issue of the envelope with a commemorative stamp, JSC Marka produced special cancels for Moscow and Rostov-on-Don.


Design Artist: Kh. Betredinova.
Quantity: 500 thousand envelopes.

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