Classical
Russia
Mikhail Glinka
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About Mikhail Glinka
Hometown
Novospasskoye, Smolensk, Russia
Born
1804
Genre
Classical
Although an amateur who only composed when so inclined, Mikhail Glinka wrote the first Russian opera, A Life for the Tsar (1836), which is able to hold its own against Europe’s finest. By integrating folk music into a coherent and lucid musical style, Glinka effectively founded the Russian nationalist style in music. Born in 1804 in Novospasskoye, his love of music was inspired by the Finnish composer Crusell’s music, which he heard performed by his uncle’s serf orchestra. In 1833, he traveled to Berlin to study harmony and counterpoint under Siegfried Dehn. Back in Russia, after composing A Life for the Tsar, he embarked on an even more audacious opera based on Pushkin’s epic fairy tale, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842); several of its features, including the then-novel whole tone scale to depict malevolent magic and the cor anglais to represent Asia, were eagerly adopted by Russian nationalist composers. Another defining work—that inspired Tchaikovsky among others—was Kamarinskaya (1848), a set of brilliantly orchestrated variations demonstrating an unexpected relationship between two Russian themes. Glinka spent his final years abroad, dying in Berlin in 1857.
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