His father was a choir conductor, organist and organ builder. He completed his primary education at, by which time he was already performing as an organist. After 1925, he attended the then, in 1928, studied organ, piano and composition at the Riga Conservatory. He slowly gained recognition as a composer while working as a teacher and a librarian. Following the Soviet Occupation, he was appointed musical director at the Dailes Theatre, and served as chairman of the Latvian Composers' Union. He was also the Director of the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra for the 1951–1952 season. Although he was forced to compose in the acceptable Soviet musical styles, he attempted to experiment whenever possible. Toward the end of the 1960s, he turned to writing. In 1969, the journal Literature and Art published his first novel: The Champs Elysées Mozart. His best known novel, Viltotais Fausts jeb pārlabota un papildināta pavārgrāmata came out in 1973. From 1956 to 1968, he was Chairman of the.
Works
His musical output is large and diverse. His best works display a theatrically concrete, striking imagination, expressive modifications of style and genre, artistic skill, and exceptionally diverse forms of humour. He composed five operas, two musical comedies, vocal-orchestral works, six concertos, chamber song-cycles, organ music, music for theatre and film, and over 100 songs for choir, including ten song-cycles. In the post-war period he maintained and developed the approach to folklore that had already appeared in the choral arrangements of the younger generation of composers in the 1930s, mainly in the works of Volfgangs Dārziņš and Jānis Kalniņš. More than his predecessors, however, he chose to develop the elements of dance, humour and play found in folk music. At times, he paid homage to the Soviet regime in his work, and yet in the 1960s his sometimes shocking innovations of form, his paradoxical mode of thinking, and his use of stylization allowed things to be viewed in a fresh and ironic way. This new vision brought with it freedom of thought and served to erode the standardized aesthetics and dogmatic thought which formed the cornerstone of Soviet ideology.
