Jānis Mediņš

Jānis Mediņš (October 9, 1890 — March 4, 1966) was a Latvian composer.

He was born in Riga. He was a vital force in musical life during the short-lived first independent Latvian Republic (1918—40). He almost single-handedly established in his country both the balletic genre – with Mīlas uzvara (‘Love's Victory’, 1934) – and the operatic with Uguns un nakts (‘Fire and Night’, 1913—19) and Dievi un cilvēki (‘Gods and Men’, 1921). Both the latter works deal with struggle against despotism, and it was as a result of multiple invasions of his country that Mediņš left Latvia 1944, eventually settling for good in Sweden.