Person details

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka

Michail Ivanovič

Glinka, Mikhail Ivanovich (1804-1857). Russian composer regarded as founder of Russian nationalist school of musical art. Although he studied music in his youth in St Petersburg he began his working life as a civil servant. In the late 1820s he turned exclusively to music and not long after left Russia to further his musical education, travelling first to Italy (1830-1833), then to Vienna and Berlin. He returned home in the middle 1830s and there wrote his two important and influential national operas A Life for the Tsar and Russlan and Ludmila. His later life was again taken up with travel, working for a time in Paris with Berlioz.