Dunayevsky was born to a
Jewish family in
Lokhvytsia in the
Poltava Governorate of the
Russian Empire (now
Myrhorod Raion,
Poltava Oblast,
Ukraine) in 1900. He studied at the
Kharkiv Musical School in 1910 where he studied
violin under
Konstanty Gorski and
Joseph Achron. During this period he started to study the theory of music under
Semyon Bogatyrev (1890–1960). He graduated in 1919 from the
Kharkiv National Kotlyarevsky University of Arts. At first he was a violinist, the leader of the orchestra in Kharkov. Then he started a conducting career. In 1924 he went to
Moscow to run the Theatre Hermitage. In 1929 he worked for the first time for a music hall ("To the icy place") with the
Moscow music hall and began collaborating with
Leonid Utesov. Later, he worked in
Leningrad (1929–1941) as a director and conductor of the
Saint Petersburg Music Hall (1929–34), and then moved to Moscow to work on his own operettas and film music. Dunayevsky wrote 14 operettas, 3 ballets, 3 cantatas, 80 choruses, 80 songs and romances, music for 88 plays and 42 films, 43 compositions for light music orchestra and 12 for jazz orchestra, 17
melodeclamations, 52 compositions for symphony orchestra and 47 piano compositions and a string quartet. Among other works, he set to music
Mikhail Svetlov's ‘
Song of Kakhovka’, written in 1935, which became extremely popular. He was one of the first composers in the
Soviet Union to start using
jazz. He wrote the music for three of the most important films of the pre-war Stalinist era,
Jolly Fellows,
Circus and the film said to be Stalin's favorite film
Volga-Volga, all directed by
Grigori Aleksandrov. In a reply to the British book
The World of Music, he listed the following as his chief works:
The Golden Valley operetta (1937),
The Free Wind operetta (1947), and music to the films
Circus (1935) and
The Kuban Cossacks (1949). He died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1955. His last piece, the operetta
White Acacia (1955), was left unfinished at his death. It was completed by
Kirill Molchanov and staged on 15 November 1955, in Moscow. A previously unknown opera libretto
Rachel (1943) by
Mikhail Bulgakov, was later found in his archive. The libretto was based on
Guy de Maupassant's
Mademoiselle Fifi and was published in a book by
Naum Shafer (see references and links below). A book of his essays and memoirs was published in 1961. ==Honors==