The composer who once said: "Music is made by the people and we composers arrange it", came, however, from a noble family, or at least a wealthy one. Indeed, at the time of Mikhail Glinka's birth, his father was a wealthy retired military officer who lived with his family comfortably settled in a village in the Smolensk Governorate, part of the Russian Empire. Over several generations, his ancestors exhibited a long tradition of service and loyalty to the Tsars. It is not by chance, then, that the first work with which Mikhail Glinka will draw attention, an opera, will be entitled A Life for the Tsar.
The first Russian composer
Such antecedents will not prevent that during the Soviet Russia, together with Alexandr Pushkin – "the first Russian poet" –, the nomenklatura includes Mijaíl Glinka in the gallery of spoiled artists as "the first Russian composer". The aforementioned enlightened assertion may have helped somewhat, but on the whole, the Soviet authorities were not wrong. Russian nationalism was the first to appear on the scene in European music, precisely by the hand of Glinka, with the aforementioned work of 1836 based on a topic of the 1600s but entirely Russian while in the rest of the European countries would have to wait until the mid-nineteenth century for the nationalist movements to begin to prevail.
The father of The Five
Mikhail Glinka, the boy who at the age of thirteen went to study in St. Petersburg to broaden his musical experience is, therefore, the father of Russian musical nationalism.
Other Russian nationals would later imbibe from him, including Tchaikovsky and, by the way, the "powerful band" that would go down in history under the name The Five, a fundamental core of Russian nationalism whose musical activity, however, would only unfold its full force some years after Glinka's death.
A meager oeuvreMikhail Glinka (1804 - 1857)
The composer's oeuvre is not very extensive. In Tchaikovsky's words, "he wrote very little" – he tells Nadhezda in 1878. And although he recognizes Glinka's enormous talent, he seems to reproach him for his class origin when he harshly adds that "he only worked like a dilettante, on a whim, when he felt in the right mood". Although later on he qualifies: "We cannot be dissatisfied with Glinka, but we must admit that he did not fulfill the mission to which his wit had destined him".
Nevertheless, the success of Life for the Tsar encouraged Glinka to compose another opera, Russlan and Ludmilla, although only the overture has survived.
Russlan and Ludmilla - Overture
Based on a poem of the same name by Pushkin, the opera was composed between 1837 and 1842 and premiered in St. Petersburg in December of the latter year. The opera is practically never performed nowadays, but its agile overture has become one of the most recognized works in the West. To such an extent, that the American sitcom "Mom" uses it as a unique "musical curtain" between one and another event of the dysfunctional family it deals with, in a comedy tone. Tchaikovsky would be surprised; pleasantly or not, who knows.
