Stefania Turkewich (1898–1977) was the first Ukrainian woman composer to receive a professional musical education and to leave behind a large body of academic work: symphonies, operas, ballets, and chamber and choral pieces. Born in Lviv into the family of a priest, she studied in Vienna and Prague with the finest teachers of her time.
Because of the Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine, the composer was forced to emigrate and settled in the United Kingdom. In Soviet-ruled Ukraine her name was suppressed for decades, so the genuine rediscovery of her music at home came only in the years of independence. Turkewich's work is an important link in European modernism and, at the same time, testimony that the Ukrainian composing school of the first half of the 20th century had brilliant women's names, unjustly erased from history by the totalitarian regime.
