23 August 2026 12:29Four years ago today, Associate Professor Lachezar Karanlakov passed away He was one of the most remarkable teachers of music history I have ever encountered.
He was a deeply erudite teacher, capable of holding his students’ attention not through dramatic gestures, but through the effortless flow of his thought - a thought that moved easily across eras, styles, composers, philosophy, literature, and culture. From time to time, his narrative would be coloured by his characteristic “incidentally” that habitual filler word of his, after which yet another unexpected door would usually open onto a new story, a new connection, a new piece of knowledge. His erudition was not merely immense - it was cosmopolitan.
As one of the last students of Mikhail Druskin, Associate Professor Karanlakov belonged to a generation that understood knowledge as a form of continuity: from teacher to student, from conversation to a new horizon, from one thought to the next.
This was a generation of teachers who left a profound mark on their students. It is enough to mention just a few of his fellow students: Professor Vesa Tsinandova-Haralampieva, a remarkable teacher of musical aesthetics, and Professor Lidia Litova, who taught folk music and knew how to ignite a genuine passion for folklore in her students. There were many others vivid personalities of immense culture and a strong sense of vocation. Sadly, some of them have now been forgotten or live on only in the memories of their students and families.
Associate Professor Karanlakov was one of those people who absorbed an enormous wealth of knowledge but rarely committed it to paper. Whether he was afraid of the blank page, lacked organisation, or simply possessed an overly scattered creative nature, I do not know. I only know that the little he did leave in writing later continued to live on in the texts of others, sometimes without his name even being mentioned.
And with him, an entire unwritten library disappeared - ideas, observations, connections, and insights that no one else could ever recreate in quite the same way.
Associate Professor Karanlakov cared for an extraordinary number of people - relatives, loved ones, friends, and acquaintances. He gave freely of his time, attention, and strength. To this day, I still wonder whether, in the end, there was anyone to care for him.
He quite literally lived among books. His home was a library - a veritable sea of volumes in three languages. It seemed to me that the books he owned outnumbered those in the music department of the National Library. I do not know what happened to them after his death. I hope they have been preserved, because such a library is not merely a private collection. It is the trace of a life devoted to knowledge and a spiritual portrait of its owner.
I am among the fortunate ones who had the opportunity to encounter the remarkable figures of this great generation of teachers. My teachers included not only those mentioned above, but also Associate Professor Lidia Kuteva, who first sat me at the piano; Professor Bogomil Starshenov; Professor Lyuba Encheva; Lili Alexandrova, my beloved teacher of solfège and music theory; Nadya Mihova, my first teacher of piano accompaniment; and Professor Lili Popova, with whom I studied piano accompaniment at the National Academy of Music.
I am grateful to all of them with all my heart. They left me not only an extraordinary wealth of knowledge, but also a profound human imprint. I owe a great part of who I am today as a musician, a teacher, and a person to them.
I can only hope that one day my own students will remember me with at least a fraction of the warmth with which I remember my teachers. For there are teachers from whom we learn facts, names, and dates. And then there are Teachers who transform the way we think, listen to, and understand music - Teachers who continue to live through what they have passed on to their students, and through them to the generations that follow.
Associate Professor Lachezar Karanlakov was one of them.
I bow before the memory of my teachers.
I bow before the memory of Associate Professor Lachezar Karanlakov.
And I remain grateful for every one of his “incidentallys”, after which the world always seemed a little larger.
Photo: Ivan Bonev
