Great Composers and Their Lives

Born in the village of Novospasskoe near Smolensk in Belarus Russia to a wealthy family, this composer’s first contact with music had to most certainly be Russian folk songs and the sound of church bells which rang every day in his small and quaint little village. At the age of 13, he was sent to a school in St. Petersburg for noble families where he studied for a period of five years. During this time, he had his first piano lessons with composer John Field, who was residing in St. Petersburg and teaching. He only had a few lessons with Field until he continued his instruction with a pianist by the name of Charles Meyer. Mikhail Glinka started composing music on his own shortly after. His early compositions were not very refined on account of the fact that he had never really studied composition seriously, yet the characteristics of folk melody in his pieces could easily be recognised even at this time. After completing his studies in 1822, he ended up staying in St. Petersburg until 1830, having received a governmental appointment that was not very demanding, thereby being able to pursue earning a living as a pianist and a singer as well.

Being drawn to music to such a great extent, it was his wish to further his studies. Making a trip to Italy with a tenor by the name of Invanov in 1830, he ended up in Milan, where he studied at the local conservatory. He encountered a great deal of composers and learned a lot, yet he never really cared for Italy. Before returning to Russia, he had studied composition under Siegfried Dehn in Berlin for a period of five months. This was his first formal composition instruction and unfortunately, it had to be cut short on account of his father’s death.

Up until this point, music life in Russia was principally full of a lot of Italian composers. They, of course, were not fond of putting elements of Russian folklore into their music. Consequently, Russian folk music was disregarded. Glinka realized that it was his life’s goal and calling to go back to Russia and combine what he had learned in Italy with the music of his Russian roots.

In 1835 and 1836, Glinka’s first opera, A Life for the Tsar, was written. It was based on a story by Zhukovsky which told about how a man, Ivan Susanin, risked his life to save the first Romanov Tsar from a gang of Poles. It was so successful that Glinka was named the Imperial Director of Music in Russia by Emperor Nicholas I himself only a year after the opera’s first performance.

Although he started his next opera right away, it did not actually get completed for another six years. Earlier on, upon Glinka’s father’s death and returning to Russia, he got married to a woman named Maria Petrovna Ivanova . The marriage turned out to be somewhat of a disaster, seeing that she was not very supportive of his career in the field of music. After his divorce, he moved in with his mother. This whole process slowed down the completion of his second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila which turned out not to be such a great success. Although it contained a great deal of Glinka’s best and very influential music, the fairy tale by Pushkin, on which the plot was based, was not suitable for opera.

After the short-coming of Ruslan and Lyudmila, Glinka did not compose a great deal of significant music with the exception of one masterpiece, Kamarinskaya, a musical piece which had a great influence upon future composers including Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and the group of Russian composers known as ‘The Five.’ (* -The latter, also known as ‘The Mighty Handful’ was an important group of composers in music history with the aim of producing a kind of Russian art music without European influence. The group consisted of the following composers: Mily Balakirev who led the group, Modest Mussorgsky, César Cui, Alexander Borodin, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.)