Tonin Harapi

Tonin Harapi (9 June 1926 – 30 July 1992) was an Albanian composer, pianist and teacher. He was one of the major figures of twentieth-century Albanian classical music and was associated with the first generations of professional Albanian composers trained after the Second World War. Harapi was born in Shkodër, a city with a strong musical tradition, and later studied at the Artistic Lyceum of Tirana and the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow. He became a professor of composition at the Conservatory of Tirana, where he trained later Albanian composers. His output included opera, operetta, choral works, orchestral music, chamber music, piano pieces, romances, children’s songs and arrangements of folk songs. Composer Thoma Simaku studied composition under Harapi at the State Conservatory of Music in Tirana. In a 2018 interview, Simaku recalled that Harapi had studied at the Moscow Conservatory and described him as a teacher who allowed students a degree of creative freedom despite the restrictions of the communist period. Compositional work Harapi composed in almost all the main genres cultivated in Albanian classical music during the socialist period. His works included the children'