Glinka was the father of the nationalist tradition in
music. He was born m Smolensk. and his first musical
influences were Rais-sian folk songs and church bells. He went
to school in St Petersburg until 1822 and remained there until
1830, earning a meagre living as a pianist and singer. His
early compositions were crude, but showed an instinctive
feeling for folk melody.
In Italy from 1830 to 1833 he encountered Bellini and
Donizetti, but ultimately felt uncomfortable with the Italian
operatic style and moved on to Berlin for his first formal
composition instruction, from Siegfried Dehn. He returned to
Russia on hearing news of his father's death, and married
shortly afterwards.
From 1835 to 1836 Glinka worked on his first
opera, A life for the Tsar. Based on a story by
Zhukovsky, it tells how Ivan Susanin, at the cost of his own
life, saved the first Romanov Tsar from a band of Poles. It
was an instant success, not least with the Tsar, and Glinka
was appointed Imperial Kapellmeister the following year.
Glinka immediately set to work on his next
opera, but the distractions of marital break-up delayed its
completion until 1 842. The result, Ruslan and Lyudmila,
was not a great success. Pushkin's fairy tale was
unsuitable as an operatic plot and the work suffered from
dramatic limpness, despite containing some of Glinka's best
music. Somewhat discouraged, in 1844 he left for Paris, where
he got on well with Berlioz, and also visited Spam; but on his
return to Russia in 1847 he brought little new music. During a
stay in Warsaw in 1848, however, he composed the orchestral
piece Kamarinskaya. which profoundly influenced
Tchaikovsky and the composers known as "The Five."
Kamarinskaya uses a "changing background" technique to
present some 70 variations of a folk tune. As the term
suggests, the melody remains unaltered while the accompaniment
evolves continually, and the work as a whole shows Glinka at
his most inventive.
In his final years, Glinka returned to Pans
before visiting Dehn again in Berlin, where he died earlv in
1857.
