Pavel Anton

Pavel Anton was born on 19 September 1936 in the village of Horodiște, then in Bălți county and today in Râșcani district, in the north of what is now the Republic of Moldova. He finished secondary school in the neighbouring village of Zăicani, also in Râșcani district, and then studied music at the Gavriil Musicescu State Conservatory in Chișinău, the institution now called the Academy of Music, Theatre and Fine Arts.

After graduating from the conservatory, Anton spent 25 years at the Alecu Russo Pedagogical Institute in Bălți, today Alecu Russo State University. As an associate professor he taught choir, choral conducting, folklore, choral arrangement and an introduction to composition, and a history of the university's music faculty lists him among its early heads of department.

At the same time he conducted the institute's student folk choir. With it he took part in student choral festivals, including Gaudeamus 4 in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1968 and the celebrations for the hundredth anniversary of the song festival in Tallinn, Estonia, in 1969. For 17 years he also led the folk choir of the teachers of Bălți, which won gold medals at all-Union competitions of folk art.

From 1989 to 2002 he taught at the Gavriil Musicescu Academy of Music in Chișinău as a professor and associate professor, heading a department, and teaching choral conducting and the methods of music teaching. Independent.md wrote that over his career he trained numerous generations of artists and music teachers.

Anton wrote widely for schools. He was the author of music textbooks for the fifth grade of general school, collections of songs for music lessons, teaching guides, methodological and scientific articles, original works for choir and choral arrangements of folk music. Together with his Bălți colleagues Anton Popov and Sergiu Croitoru he was among the authors of the home-grown Moldovan textbooks and guides for music education in grades one to eight that were published from 1985.

His song collections include Te caut, iubire, a book of romances (2002); Foaie verde lămâiță, songs for preschool and school children (2003); Mânat de credință și dor, songs about Stephen the Great (2005); and Codrule, Măria-Ta, choruses for schoolchildren and young people (2005).

The death of Pavel Anton at the age of 90 was reported by Moldovan media, including TV8, Independent.md and NordNews, on the morning of 16 October 2026. The reports said he was being buried that same day at the Saint Lazarus Cemetery in Chișinău, so he may have died a day or two before; the exact date and place of death and the cause were not made public. The date used on this page is the date the death was reported. Tributes described him as one of the outstanding figures of Moldovan musical culture and of the country's choral art.

Anton's legacy lies mainly in music education. Over nearly four decades at the pedagogical institute in Bălți and the Academy of Music in Chișinău he taught generations of choir conductors and school music teachers, and his textbooks and song collections were written for Moldovan classrooms. Independent.md credited him with a valuable contribution to music education, to the use of folklore and to the promotion of the choral movement, much of it through his work with student and amateur folk choirs. He was awarded the badge of Eminent of Education and Culture of the Republic of Moldova and a gold medal, and was entered in the Book of Honour of the talents of the Republic of Moldova.