Mykola Lysenko

Mykola Lysenko was born in 1842 and grew up in Hrymky, a small village on the Dneiper river between Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk. His father came from an ancient noble family whose origins could be traced back to the Cossacks in the 17th century. Although Lysenko’s mother, a Ukrainian who grew up in St. Petersburg, never spoke Ukrainian and had her son taught French, dancing, etiquette and the piano, Lysenko’s Ukrainian identity would become a key element of his life and work. After attending several boarding schools in the Russian-governed East of Ukraine, he completed a degree in Natural Sciences at the University of Kyiv. It was during this time that he began his life-long ethnographic work, collecting and editing Ukrainian folk songs. Lysenko received the basis of his musical training at the Leipzig Conservatoire, where his most distinguished teachers included Ferdinand David, Ignaz Moscheles, Carl Reinecke and Ernst Wenzel. In autumn 1874 he then moved to the Conservatoire in St. Petersburg to spend two years studying with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. As a brilliant concert pianist, he attracted considerable attention in the concerts of the Russian Music Society until 1875, when the directorate’s consistent suppression of Ukrainian culture forced him to resign. Once he had completed his training with Rimsky-Korsakov, Lysenko was offered a post as Kapellmeister at a private opera house. Despite the prospect of promotion to the Imperial Theatre, he rejected the offer because in the course of the prevailing “Russification”, the management of the theatre had thwarted the performance of new Ukrainian works. He also rejected the Moscow premiere of his opera Taras Bulba in Russian, even though this would have been a significant milestone in his career. Lysenko returned to Kyiv where he spent the remainder of his life dedicated to composing and teaching and where he established an independent Ukrainian national style on the basis of his ethnomusicological studies. After he died in 1912, 100,000 mourners accompanied his funeral procession. The Conservatoire in Lviv, the opera and ballet theatre in Kharkiv and the pillared hall of the National Philharmonia in Kyiv are all named after him.