Mikhail Glinka

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Mikhail Glinka died suddenly in Berlin on the 15th of February 1857, following a cold. Within a few months, his body had been carried all the way to Saint Petersburg and reinterred in the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. Russia was claiming him back, even in death. That impulse tells you something essential about what Glinka meant to his country. He was the first Russian composer to win wide recognition within Russia itself, and composers who came after him looked to his work as the starting point for an entire national tradition. How did a child raised in near-total confinement, wrapped in furs and fed sweets by an overprotective grandmother, become the fountainhead of Russian classical music? And why did a piece written for a national anthem contest spend decades as a regional hymn before briefly serving as the anthem of post-Soviet Russia? Those questions run through everything that followed from Glinka's life.

• 2. A Childhood of Church Bells

  ›

  Glinka was born in the village of Novospasskoye, not far from the Desna River in the Smolensk Governorate. His family carried a long tradition of service to the tsars, and his great-great-grandfather, Wiktoryn Wladyslaw Glinka of the Trzaska coat of arms, had been a Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth nobleman who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in 1655 and received the new name Yakov Yakovlevich. His father had retired as an army captain, and several relatives had lively cultural interests. Yet the dominant figure of Glinka's earliest years was his paternal grandmother, who kept her room at 25 degrees Celsius and rarely let the boy leave it. She fed him sweets, wrapped him in furs, and shaped him into something of a hypochondriac. Later in life he relied on numerous physicians, and often fell victim to quacks. The music that reached him in that confined room came from two sources: the village church bells, tuned to a dissonant chord, and the folk songs of passing peasant choirs. Those choirs sang using the podgolosochnaya technique, an improvised style of dissonant harmonies placed below the melody. The dissonance Glinka absorbed in childhood made him comfortable with harmonies that Western European training might have drilled out of him. After his grandmother died he moved to his maternal uncle's estate, roughly 10 kilometers away, and there he heard an orchestra for the first time. At around ten years old he listened to that ensemble play a clarinet quartet by the Finnish composer Bernhard Henrik Crusell. "Music is my soul," he wrote years later, recalling that moment.

• 3. Education and Early Wandering

  ›

  At 13, Glinka left Novospasskoye for Saint Petersburg to attend a school for children of the nobility. He learned Latin, English, and Persian alongside mathematics and zoology, and his musical education expanded quickly. He took three piano lessons from John Field, the Irish composer of nocturnes who was living in Saint Petersburg at the time, then continued with Charles Mayer. When he left school, his father pushed him toward the Foreign Office, and he was appointed assistant secretary of the Department of Public Highways. The work was light, which suited him. He spent his time in drawing rooms and social gatherings, writing melancholy romances that pleased wealthy amateurs. In 1830, at a physician's recommendation, he traveled to Italy with a tenor companion, moving at a leisurely pace through Germany and Switzerland before settling in Milan. There he studied at the conservatory under Francesco Basili, though he found counterpoint irksome. He met Mendelssohn and Berlioz, and spent three years listening to singers and observing Italian opera at close range. That immersion eventually produced disenchantment rather than devotion. He concluded that his mission was to return to Russia and do for Russian music what Donizetti and Bellini had done for Italian music. On his way home he heard Franz Liszt in Vienna, then spent five months in Berlin studying composition under Siegfried Dehn. That Berlin period produced a Capriccio on Russian Themes for piano duet and an unfinished Symphony on Two Russian Themes. Word of his father's death in 1834 cut the stay short and sent him back to Novospasskoye.

• 4. Two Operas, Two Fates

  ›

  A Life for the Tsar had an unlikely spark. While in Berlin, Glinka had become enamored of a beautiful singer and composed Six Studies for Contralto for her. His plan to return to her collapsed when his sister's German maid arrived without the papers to cross the border, and he abandoned the plan and the romance together. Back in Saint Petersburg he met Maria Petrovna Ivanova, married her quickly, and found the marriage almost immediately unhappy. Maria was tactless and indifferent to his music, and her constant criticism alongside her mother's wore down what his contemporaries described as his naturally sweet disposition. His fondness for Maria at the beginning was said to have inspired the trio in the first act of the opera he was now writing. That opera, originally titled Ivan Susanin, was set in 1612 and told the story of the Russian peasant Ivan Susanin, who sacrifices his life for the Tsar by misleading a group of Polish soldiers hunting the Tsar down. Tsar Nicholas I followed the work's development with personal interest and suggested the title change. The premiere on the 9th of December 1836, conducted by Catterino Cavos who had himself written an opera on the same subject in Italy, was a great success. Nicholas rewarded Glinka with a ring valued at 4,000 rubles. In 1837 Glinka was installed as instructor of the Imperial Chapel Choir with a yearly salary of 25,000 rubles and lodging at court. At the Tsar's suggestion in 1838 he traveled to Ukraine to recruit new voices, and the 19 boys he found earned him an additional 1,500 rubles. His second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila, drew on a tale by Alexander Pushkin. The plot was reportedly sketched in 15 minutes by the poet Konstantin Bakhturin, who was drunk at the time. The opera's dramatic construction suffered for it. The overture features a descending whole-tone scale associated with the villainous dwarf Chernomor, who abducts Lyudmila from her father, the Prince of Kiev. Act 3 contains several routine ballet numbers alongside Italianate coloratura, but Glinka wove folk melody throughout the musical argument in a way that went beyond decoration, and much of the borrowed folk material is oriental in origin. When Ruslan and Lyudmila debuted on the 9th of December 1842, exactly six years to the day after the premiere of A Life for the Tsar, audiences received it coolly. Glinka spent a dejected year after that reception before he found his spirits again in Paris and Spain.

• 5. Spain, Paris, and a Final Chapter

  ›

  In Spain, Glinka met Don Pedro Fernandez, who became his secretary and companion for the last nine years of his life. Paris gave him something else: Hector Berlioz conducted excerpts from Glinka's operas and wrote an appreciative article about them. Glinka already admired Berlioz's music and resolved to compose what he called fantasies pittoresques for orchestra. Beginning in 1852 he spent two years living quietly in Paris, frequently visiting the botanical and zoological gardens. His Spanish travels fed directly into his orchestral output. His two Spanish works, Jota Aragonesa from 1845 and A Night in Madrid from 1848 and revised in 1851, drew on music he had encountered there. The symphonic poem Kamarinskaya, from 1848, was built on Russian folk songs. Tchaikovsky later called Kamarinskaya the acorn from which the oak of later Russian symphonic music grew. After those Paris years Glinka moved again to Berlin, where his final five months ended with his sudden death at age 52.

• 6. The Five and a Living Legacy

  ›

  Alexander Serov was the first critic to identify the new direction Glinka had opened in Russian music. His friend Vladimir Stasov then took up the idea theoretically, and the composers known as The Five developed it further. The Five produced a distinctly Russian style that built on what Glinka had started, using historical events and folk material as raw elements of serious musical argument. The debate over Glinka's two operas became heated in the musical press after his death, particularly between Stasov and his former friend Serov. Modern Russian music critic Viktor Korshikov wrote that Russian musical culture would not have developed without three operas: Ivan Soussanine, Ruslan and Ludmila, and The Stone Guest. Two of those three were Glinka's. In 1884, Mitrofan Belyayev founded the annual Glinka Prize; early winners included Alexander Borodin, Mily Balakirev, Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Cesar Cui, and Anatoly Lyadov. Three Russian conservatories carry Glinka's name, in Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, and Magnitogorsk. A minor planet, 2205 Glinka, was named in his honor by the Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Chernykh after its discovery in 1973, and a crater on Mercury also bears his name. A street in Dnipro, Ukraine, that had been named after Glinka was renamed in September 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to honor Queen Elizabeth II. And the overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila found a new life in the United States as the theme of the long-running television comedy series Mom, whose creators felt the fast-paced, complex orchestral music captured their characters' struggle to keep up with the demands of daily life. George Balanchine brought Glinka into the ballet world in 1967, when the New York City Ballet premiered Glinkiana, choreographed to four of Glinka's works; of those four sections, only the Valse-Fantaisie is still performed regularly today.

• 7. An Anthem's Strange Journey

  ›

  A lesser-known work called "Patrioticheskaya Pesnya" was supposedly written for a national anthem contest in 1833. It went unnoticed for well over a century. In 1990, the Supreme Soviet of Russia adopted it as the regional anthem of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, which had been the only Soviet constituent state without its own anthem. After the Soviet Union dissolved, the hymn was kept in use unofficially. In 1993 it was officially confirmed as the Russian national anthem. It remained the anthem until 2000, when it was replaced by the Soviet anthem set to new lyrics. A melody composed for a contest in 1833 had, by an unlikely sequence of political decisions, served as the anthem of a superpower's largest republic and then briefly as the anthem of Russia itself before being set aside. That trajectory is a reminder that Glinka's influence on Russian public life ran considerably deeper than the concert hall.