Career
His early style was modernistic, later he used more traditional neo-Romantic idioms. Meitus was born to a Jewish family. In 1919 he graduated from the School of Music in piano from Heinrich Neuhaus, and from the Kharkov Institute of Music and Drama in the composition class of C. Bogatyrenko in 1931.
During World World War II he was evacuated to the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic, where he wrote the first Turkmen opera.
Meitus made his debut in film in 1932. He is famous for his 18 operas, a number of orchestral works and about 300 songs on Ukrainian and Russian classical poems, among them Stolen Happiness, the epic Yaroslav the Wise, Daughter of the wind, Leila and Majnun, Young Guard, and Abakan.
He was buried in the Baikove Cemetery.
