page_title: Mykola Leontovych
section_title: Early musical career and family
hierarchical_section_title: Mykola Leontovych / Biography / Early musical career and family
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of the Ukrainian composer Mykola Leontovych.
context_page_description: Mykola Dmytrovych Leontovych was a Ukrainian composer, choral conductor, and teacher of international renown. His music was inspired by Mykola Lysenko and the Ukrainian National Music School. Leontovych specialised in a cappella choral music, ranging from original compositions, to church music, to elaborate arrangements of folk music.
  Leontovych was born and raised in the Podolia province of the Russian Empire. He was educated as a priest in the Kamianets-Podilskyi Theological Seminary and later furthered his musical education at the Saint Petersburg Court Capella and private lessons with Boleslav Yavorsky. With the independence of the Ukrainian state in the 1917 revolution, Leontovych moved to Kyiv where he worked at the Kyiv Conservatory and the Mykola Lysenko Institute of Music and Drama. He is recognised for composing Shchedryk in 1904, known to the English-speaking world as Carol of the Bells or Ring, Christmas Bells. He is known as a martyr in the Eastern Orthodox Ukrainian Church, where he is also remembered for his liturgy, the first liturgy composed in the vernacular, specifically in the modern Ukrainian language. He was assassinated by a Soviet agent in 1921.
context_section_description: At the time, a career in music in Ukraine meant having an unstable income, causing Leontovych to seek employment wherever he could find it. Leontovych worked in Kyiv, Yekaterinoslav, and Podolia guberniyas over the next few years in order to remain gainfully employed. His first position after graduating was in a secondary school in the village of Chukiv (present-day Vinnytsia Oblast) as a vocal and maths teacher. During this time, Leontovych continued to transcribe and arrange folk songs. He completed his First Compilation of Songs from Podolia and began working on his second compilation. He also inspired the children at the school to sing in the choir and play in the orchestra. He would later write a book about this as a professor at the Kyiv Conservatory, titled Як я організував оркестр у сільській школі (How I Organised an Orchestra in a Village School).
  After several conflicts with the school's administration, Leontovych got a new job as a teacher of church music and calligraphy at the Theological College in Tyvriv. Besides working with the college choir, Leontovych organised an amateur orchestra that often performed at college events. As he did earlier with choirs, Leontovych included arrangements of folk songs among the usual religious works sung in theological schools. These included arrangements by Mykola Lysenko, his own choral arrangements of folk songs, and entirely original works. One such work was based on a poem by Taras Shevchenko titled Зоре моя вечірняя (Oh My Evening Star).
  During this period, Leontovych met a Volynhian girl named Claudia Feropontivna Zhovtevych, whom he married on 22 March 1902.  The young couple's first daughter, Halyna, was born in 1903. They later had a second daughter named Yevheniya.
  Financial hardships prompted Leontovych to accept an offer to move to the city of Vinnytsia to instruct at the Church-Educators' College. Again, he organised a choir and, later, a concert band, with which he performed both secular and spiritual music. In 1903, he published his Second Compilation of Songs from Podolia which he dedicated to Mykola Lysenko.
  In 1903 and 1904, during his vacation from the Church-Educators' College, Leontovych travelled to St. Petersburg. There, he attended lectures held at the St. Petersburg Court Capella, which was associated with composers Maksym Berezovsky, Dmytro Bortniansky, and Mikhail Glinka. He studied music theory, harmony, and polyphony with Semen Barmotin, and choral performance with Puzarevskiy, both of whom were well known at the time. On 22 April 1904, he earnt his credentials as a choirmaster of church choruses.
  Again, disputes with the administration of the college resulted in Leontovych's seeking new employment. In the spring of 1904, he left Podolia and moved to the Donbas province in eastern Ukraine, where he became a teacher of vocal and instrumental music in a school for railroad workers' children. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, Leontovych organised a choir of workers that performed in meetings. These works included arrangements of Ukrainian, Jewish, Armenian, Russian, and Polish folk songs. Leontovych's activity caught the attention of local authorities, and in the spring of 1908, he was forced to move back to his native Podolia province to the city of Tulchyn.
caption: Photograph of Mykola Leontovych
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