Nikolai Karlovich Medtner (Russian: Никола́й Ка́рлович Ме́тнер) (5 January 1880 [O.S. 24 December 1879] – 13 November 1951) was a Russian composer and pianist.

A younger contemporary of Sergei Rachmaninoff and Alexander Scriabin, he wrote a substantial number of compositions, all of which include the piano. His works include fourteen piano sonatas, three violin sonatas, three piano concerti, a piano quintet, three works for two pianos, many shorter piano pieces, and 108 songs including two substantial works for vocalise. His 38 piano pieces for which he appears to have invented the title Skazki (generally known as "Fairy Tales" in English but more correctly translated as "Tales") contain some of his most original music and are as central to his output as the piano sonatas.

Nikolai Medtner was born, the youngest of five children, in Moscow on Christmas Eve 1879; the Julian calendar was in force in Russia — according to the Gregorian calendar his date of birth would have been 5 January 1880.

Medtner first took piano lessons from his mother until the age of ten, when he entered the Moscow Conservatory. He graduated in 1900 at the age of 20, taking the Anton Rubinstein prize, having studied under Pavel Pabst, Wassily Sapellnikoff, Vasily Safonov and Sergei Taneyev among others. Despite his conservative musical tastes, Medtner's compositions and his pianism were highly regarded by his contemporaries. To the consternation of his family, but with the support of his former teacher Taneyev, he soon rejected a career as a performer and turned to composition, partly inspired by the intellectual challenge of Ludwig van Beethoven's late piano sonatas and string quartets. Among his students in this period was Alexander Vasilyevich Alexandrov.

During the years leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution, Medtner lived at home with his parents. During this time Medtner fell in love with Anna Mikhaylovna Bratenskaya, a respected violinist and the young wife of his older brother Emil. Later, when World War I broke out, Emil was interned in Germany where he had been studying. He generously gave Anna the freedom to marry his brother. Medtner and Anna were married in 1918.

Unlike his friend Rachmaninoff, Medtner did not leave Russia until well after the Revolution. Rachmaninoff secured Medtner a tour of the United States and Canada in 1924; his recitals were often all - Medtner evenings consisting of sonatas interspersed with songs and shorter pieces. Medtner never adapted himself to the commercial aspects of touring and his concerts became infrequent. Esteemed in England, he settled in London in 1936, modestly teaching, playing and composing to a strict daily routine.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Medtner's income from German publishers disappeared, and during this hardship ill health became an increasing problem. His devoted pupil Edna Iles gave him shelter in Warwickshire where he completed his Third Piano Concerto, performing it at a 1943 Promenade Concert.

In 1949 a Medtner Society was founded in London by His Highness Jayachamaraja Wodeyar Bahadur, The Maharajah of Mysore. (Mysore is part of India, now a state of Karnataka.) His Highness was an honorary Fellow of Trinity College of Music, London, in 1945 and also the first president of the Philharmonia Concert Society, London. He founded the Medtner Society to record all of Medtner's works. Medtner, already in declining health, recorded his three Piano Concertos and some sonatas, chamber music, numerous songs and shorter works before his death in London in 1951. In one of these recordings he partnered Benno Moiseiwitsch in his two - piano work entitled "Russian Round - Dance", Op 58, No. 1; in another he accompanied Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in several of his lieder, including The Muse, a Pushkin setting from 1913. These historic recordings demonstrate Medtner's forceful magnetic pianism and creative personality, generally undimmed by his undoubtedly failing health. In gratitude to his patron, Medtner dedicated his Third Piano Concerto to the Maharajah.

Medtner died at his home, 69 Wentworth Road, Golders Green, London in 1951, and is buried in Hendon Cemetery.

Whether Medtner’s music makes inroads into the wider repertoire or remains the territory of a few performers and listeners depends on whether it is true that he sacrificed melodic interest, beauty, and communicativeness (or enough of them) on the altar of complexity, the sonata form, and counterpoint. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that Medtner possessed considerable skill in writing heartfelt melody of rare beauty and an uncanny skill in developing thematic material. Imbued with a restless quality that demands repeated listenings to penetrate, Medtner's music often has a psychologically intense, almost demonic character. The piano works in particular are notoriously difficult to sight - read and require enormous technical and intellectual resources to perform. Yet Medtner's best melodies speak to the listener on a direct emotional level. It may be that some of his works are better advocates for him in this respect — his songs and concertos are more directly communicative than the solo piano music, the violin sonatas more extroverted — but it is also true that his music is now that of a cult composer, at least in reputation and possibly in fact.

Geoffrey Tozer recorded almost all of Medtner's works for the piano including all the concertos and sonatas. Hamish Milne has recorded most of the solo piano works, while Geoffrey Douglas Madge and Konstantin Scherbakov have recorded the three piano concertos. Other pianists who championed Medtner's work and left behind recordings include Benno Moiseiwitsch, Sviatoslav Richter, Edna Iles, Emil Gilels, Yevgeny Svetlanov, Earl Wild and Malcolm Binns. In modern times, pianists noted for their advocacy include Marc - André Hamelin, Irina Mejoueva, Nikolai Demidenko, Boris Berezovsky, Paul Stewart, Dmitri Alexeev, Andrey Ponochevny and Yevgeny Sudbin. The last 20 years have seen a big increase in recording activity, if not in live performances, and the solo piano and chamber music discography is looking quite healthy.

Far fewer singers have tackled the songs. Medtner himself recorded a selection with the sopranos Oda Slobodskaya, Tatiana Makushina, Margaret Ritchie and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. In recent times Susan Gritton and Ludmilla Andrew have recorded complete CDs with Geoffrey Tozer, as has Caroline Vitale with Peter Baur. The bass - baritone Vassily Savenko has recorded a considerable number of Medtner songs with Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Blok and Victor Yampolsky. A handful of other singers have included Medtner songs in compilations; particularly notable are historic recordings by Zara Dolukhanova and Irina Arkhipova. However many songs are not available on CD, and some await their first recording.

Medtner recorded piano rolls of some of his works for Welte - Mignon in 1923 and Duo - Art in 1925.

Medtner's one book, The Muse and the Fashion, being a defence of the foundations of the art of music (1935, reprinted 1957 and 1978) was a statement of his artistic credo and reaction to some of the trends of the time. He believed strongly that there were immutable laws to music, whose essence was in song. The English translation of The Muse and the Fashion by Alfred Swan (1951) is hard to find outside US libraries.

Barrie Martyn's Nicolas Medtner: His Life and Music is a scholarly account of the composer's life and works. It provides the biographical context of every composition along with musical analysis or commentary. Extracts from letters, contemporary sources, and compositions are interspersed throughout the narrative, along with a good number of photographs.

After Medtner's death, the Mysore Foundation sponsored the publication of Medtner: A Memorial Volume, also titled Nicolas Medtner (1879 - 1951): A Tribute to his Art and Personality. It contains photographs and essays from his widow, friends, critics, musicians, composers, and admirers. A few of the contributors were: Alfred Swan, translator of Medtner's The Muse and the Fashion into English, Ivan Ilyin, Ernest Newman, Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, Marcel Dupré, Russian music critic Leonid Sabeneev, Canadian pianist and close friend of the composer Alfred La Liberté, singers Margaret Ritchie, Tatania Makushina and Oda Slobodskaya, and Medtner himself via extracts from Muse and the Fashion. The editor of the volume was Richard Holt.

Robert Rimm's The Composer - Pianists: Hamelin and the Eight contains a chapter on Medtner and Rachmaninoff.

In 2004, Natalia Konsistorum published, in Russian, Nikolai Karlovich Medtner: Portrait of a Composer. The book is available in a German translation by Christoph Flamm and is notable for the two CDs it contains with original recordings of a variety of Medtner's works.

There have been numerous dissertations on Medtner's music. One of the most influential is Der russische Komponist Nikolaj Metner : Studien und Materialien by Christoph Flamm. Originally presented as the author's Ph.D thesis (Heidelberg, 1995), it was published by Kuhn. It includes letters, reviews and other documents in German, Russian, English and French, a bibliography and partial discography.

In 2003, David J. Skvorak wrote a doctoral thesis Thematic unity in Nicolas Medtner's works for piano : Skazki, sonatas, and piano quintet at the University of Cincinnati, published by UMI. It contains theoretical analyses of several of Medtner's works.