Biography
Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka was born on 1 June 1804 (20 May by the Julian calendar then in use in Russia) on the Novospasskoye estate in Smolensk Governorate and died on 15 February 1857 in Berlin. Birdsong, his nanny's folk songs and church bells were his earliest musical impressions, and hearing a clarinet quartet around age fourteen kindled his passion for music. From 1817 he attended a boarding school for the nobility in Saint Petersburg, where he received piano lessons from the Irish pianist and composer John Field. Between 1830 and 1833 he travelled through Italy, meeting Vincenzo Bellini and Gaetano Donizetti, and then studied counterpoint in Berlin with Siegfried Dehn. His opera A Life for the Tsar brought him his breakthrough in 1836, followed in 1842 by Ruslan and Lyudmila after Alexander Pushkin's narrative poem. Glinka is regarded as the founder of an independent Russian art-music tradition and became a model for the later group of composers known as The Mighty Handful.
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