Editing Nikolai Myaskovsky (section)

==Early years==
Myaskovsky was born in [[Modlin Fortress|Nowogieorgiewsk]], near Warsaw, [[Congress Poland]], [[Russian Empire]], the son of an engineer officer in the Russian army. After the death of his mother the family was brought up by his father's sister, Yelikonida Konstantinovna Myaskovskaya, who had been a singer at the [[Saint Petersburg]] Opera. The family moved to Saint Petersburg in his teens.

Though he learned piano and violin, he was discouraged from pursuing a musical career, and entered the military. However, a performance of [[Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky|Tchaikovsky]]'s [[Symphony No. 6 (Tchaikovsky)|''Pathétique'' Symphony]] conducted by [[Arthur Nikisch]] in 1896 inspired him to become a composer. In 1902 he completed his training as an engineer, like his father. As a young subaltern with a Sappers Battalion in Moscow, he took some private lessons with [[Reinhold Glière]] and when he was posted to Saint Petersburg he studied with [[Ivan Krizhanovsky]] as preparation for entry into the [[Saint Petersburg Conservatory]], where he enrolled in 1906 and became a student of [[Anatoly Lyadov]] and [[Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov]].

A late starter, Myaskovsky was the oldest student in his class but soon became firm friends with the youngest, [[Sergei Prokofiev]], and they remained friends throughout the older man's life.<ref>Their collected correspondence, which has not been translated into English and is said (e.g. in the Volkov ''Testimony''{{better source needed|date=July 2014}}), to have been heavily bowdlerized as regards political content, was published in 1977 as ''S. S. Prokofiev i N. Ya. Myaskovsky Perepiska'' (Moscow: Sovyetskii Kompozitor) edited by a committee with [[Dmitri Kabalevsky]] at its head. See also ''Sergey Prokofiev Diaries 1907–1914: Prodigious Youth'' translated and annotated by Anthony Phillips (London: Faber & Faber, 2006).</ref> At the Conservatory, they shared a dislike of their professor [[Anatoly Lyadov]], which, since Lyadov disliked the music of [[Edvard Grieg]], led to Myaskovsky's choice of a theme by Grieg for the variations with which he closed his [[String Quartet No. 3 (Myaskovsky)|String Quartet No. 3]].<ref>The quartet was probably not his third in order of composition, but eventually it was so published. The Third and Fourth string quartets share [[opus number|Opus]] 33 with the Quartets Nos. 1 and 2, and were first published together with them in the collected edition published after the composer's death, whether or not they were first published around the same time. These works - No. 3 in D minor, and No. 4 in F minor - are mid-1930s revisions of works written in the 1900s decade, not new works as are the other two; so their style is quite different.</ref>