Mikhail Glinka

Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857) is universally regarded as the father of Russian classical music: the first Russian composer to win wide recognition in his own country and the fountainhead of the national school that followed. Born into a wealthy landowning family, he turned to music and, after studies and travels in Italy and Germany, returned home determined to create a genuinely Russian art music. His two operas, A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila, and his orchestral works fused Russian folk idioms with Western technique, and their influence on the next generation (Balakirev, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and through them Tchaikovsky) was immense. Inventive, cosmopolitan and harmonically adventurous (he was among the first to use the whole-tone scale), Glinka opened the door through which all of Russian music would pass.