Emmanuel Metter

Who was Emmanuel Metter?

Emmanuel Leonievich Metter was a Ukrainian conductor.

Emmanuel Metter was born in Kherson, Ukraine, in a Jewish family running a business. He entered the faculty of medicine at the Kharkiv National University on August 26, 1897; however, he transferred to the faculty of law on September 7, 1898, graduated in 1906 and became a lawyer. He then entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory as an unregistered student in September 1906 and studied under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov. He left the conservatory in May 1907, taught at Moscow Conservatory and conducted at the Bolshoi Theatre. When Metter was a conductor at the opera house in Kazan, Russia, he got married to Elena Osovskaya, a Polish prima ballerina of the opera house.

Right before the Russian Revolution they exiled themselves to Harbin, Republic of China and Metter became conductor of Harbin Symphony Orchestra. In early 1920s Osovskaya was invited to become a professor at the Takarazuka Revue in Takarazuka, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, then Metter moved to Japan also in March 1926.