Dimitri Tiomkin — composer (high noon) with roots in the Russian Empire
Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin was born in Kremenchug, in the Poltava Governorate of the Russian Empire, now Kremenchuk in Ukraine, on 10 May 1894, into a Jewish family. His mother, Marie, née Tartakovsky, was a pianist and music teacher who gave him his first lessons; his father, Zinovy Tiomkin, was a physician. Many sources give his birth year as 1899, the year in his passport; according to his estate, his father had the date altered when arranging his travel papers.
He entered the St Petersburg Conservatory as a boy and studied piano with Felix Blumenfeld and Isabelle Vengerova and composition with the director, Alexander Glazunov, who engaged him to tutor his niece. After the Revolution he found work under the new authorities, but in 1921 he left for Berlin, where his father was living, and studied there with Ferruccio Busoni and his pupils Egon Petri and Michael Zadora, giving concerts and writing light music. After a period in Paris he went to New York in 1925 as a pianist for a Broadway dance studio, and in 1927 married the dancer and choreographer Albertina Rasch. As a concert pianist he is generally credited with introducing George Gershwin's music to European audiences.
After the stock market crash of 1929 the couple moved to Hollywood. Tiomkin's scores for Frank Capra, beginning with Lost Horizon (1937) and including It's a Wonderful Life (1946), established him, and he became a citizen of the United States in 1937. He wrote three scores for Alfred Hitchcock, among them Strangers on a Train (1951) and Dial M for Murder (1954), and became closely associated with the western. He won four Academy Awards: two for High Noon (1952), for its score and the song Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin', one for The High and the Mighty (1954) and one for The Old Man and the Sea (1958).
After his wife's death in 1967 he moved to Europe. His last major project took him back to the Soviet Union: he was executive producer and music arranger of the Mosfilm production Tchaikovsky (1969), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He died in London on 11 November 1979, aged eighty-five.
"Left Soviet Russia in 1921 for Berlin, where his father lived; Paris 1924-25; New York from 1925; Hollywood from 1929; US citizen 1937; spent his last years in Europe and died in London in 1979."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kremenchug, Poltava Governorate (now Kremenchuk, Ukraine)
Born in Kremenchug in the Russian Empire in 1894, he studied at the St Petersburg Conservatory under Felix Blumenfeld, Isabelle Vengerova and Alexander Glazunov and left for Berlin in 1921. In 1969 he returned to work in Moscow as executive producer and arranger of the Mosfilm production Tchaikovsky.
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Kremenchug, Poltava Governorate (now Kremenchuk, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"I am Russian. I have only become American in my music."