Rajko Maksimović (1935, Serbia) acquired his BA and MA degrees in composition in 1961 and 1965, respectively. He was a professor of composition and orches-tration at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade until his retirement in 2001. Also, he was a visiting professor at the Faculty of Drama in Belgrade and the Academy of Art in Novi Sad.
Works by Maksimović have been performed in Serbia and abroad, and he has received a number of awards, including a Stevan Hristić Award (for Piano Concerto), Mokranjac Award (for Testament of Petar Petrović Njegoš, Prince-Bishop of Montenegro), and October Prize of the City of Belgrade (for Passion of the Holy Prince Lazar).
So far, Maksimović has had five rather successful and well-received sin-gle-author concerts in Belgrade.
Radio Television Novi Sad made a 50-minute film about his work and pieces.
His main works were originally released on LPs, whereas in 2002, PGP-RTS, the music production branch of the Serbian Broadcasting Corporation, released a triple CD edition and then another two singles featuring his major works.
Maksimović wrote and published a memoire-autobiographic trilogy titled Tako je to bilo (So It Was, 1998–2002) and, in 2008, another book, Govor muzike (Music Talking), co-written with Miloš Jevtić.

Madrigal is a reworking of my most successful attempt in that genre, Pero, for men’s choir, from my book of madri-gals Iz tmine pojanje (Chanting from Darkness), which was per-formed – in its original version – only once and never again! How unfair!
That prompted me to rework it, first into a piece titled Hamlet, for mixed choir, a setting of verses by Shakespeare (2015), and then, in 2016, into a brass quintet.