Mikhail Glinka
His great-great-grandfather was a Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth nobleman, Wiktoryn Władysław Glinka of the Trzaska coat of arms who was given lands in the Smolensk Voivodeship.
The only music he heard in his youthful confinement was the sounds of the village church bells and the folk songs of passing peasant choirs.
At the age of about ten he heard them play a clarinet quartet by the Finnish composer Bernhard Henrik Crusell, which had a profound effect upon him.
[3] When he left school his father wanted him to join the Foreign Office, and he was appointed assistant secretary of the Department of Public Highways.
The light work allowed Glinka to settle into the life of a musical dilettante, frequenting the city's drawing rooms and social gatherings.
After three years listening to singers, romancing women with his music, and meeting famous people including Mendelssohn and Berlioz, he became disenchanted with Italy.
His initial fondness for her was said to have inspired the trio in the first act of his opera A Life for the Tsar (1836), but his naturally sweet disposition coarsened under his wife's and mother-in-law's constant criticism.
Set in 1612, it tells the story of the Russian peasant and patriotic hero Ivan Susanin who sacrifices his life for the Tsar by leading astray a group of marauding Poles who were hunting him.
The overture features a descending whole tone scale associated with the villainous dwarf Chernomor, who has abducted Lyudmila, daughter of the Prince of Kiev.
There is much Italianate coloratura, and Act 3 contains several routine ballet numbers, but Glinka's great achievement lies in his use of folk melody which becomes thoroughly infused into the musical argument.
Soussanine is an opera where the main character is the people; Ruslan is the mythical, deeply Russian intrigue; and in Guest, the drama dominates over the softness of the beauty of sound.
Glinka's work, and that of the composers and other creative people he inspired, has been instrumental in the development of a distinctly Russian artistic style that occupies a prominent place in world culture.
After Glinka's death, the relative merits of his two operas became a topic of heated debate in the musical press, especially between Vladimir Stasov and his former friend Alexander Serov.
Glinka's orchestral composition Kamarinskaya (1848) was said by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky to be "the acorn from which the oak" of later Russian symphonic music grew.
[11] In 1884, Mitrofan Belyayev founded the annual Glinka Prize, whose early winners included Alexander Borodin, Mily Balakirev, Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, César Cui and Anatoly Lyadov.
[12] A lesser work that received attention in the last decade of the 20th century was Glinka's "Patrioticheskaya Pesnya", supposedly written for a contest for a national anthem in 1833.
[21] The stirring overture to Glinka's opera Ruslan and Lyudmila is heard as the theme of the long-running U.S. television comedy series Mom.
Its creators felt the fast-paced, complex orchestral music reflected the characters' struggles to overcome their destructive habits and keep up with the demands of daily life.
