Mykola Leontovych
Mykola Leontovych was a Ukrainian composer and choral conductor. He was born on December 13, 1877, in Monastyrok, in the Podolia Governorate of the Russian Empire, and died on January 23, 1921, in Markivka. He also worked as a music teacher and choir director.
His father, a village priest, played several instruments and directed a seminary choir for a time. Leontovych received his first musical instruction from him. He studied at the Podolia Theological Seminary in Kamianets-Podilskyi, where he learned music theory and choral singing, and began arranging folk melodies. After graduating in 1898, he taught in rural schools and continued his musical studies independently. He published collections of Podolian songs in 1901 and 1903, and studied at the Imperial Court Chapel in St. Petersburg during the 1903–04 holidays.
From 1904 to 1908, Leontovych taught singing and music at a railway school in Hryshyne. He later taught at a diocesan women’s school in Tulchyn and studied with music theorist Boleslav Yavorsky. In 1916, a university choir in Kyiv performed his arrangement of “Shchedryk,” which was warmly received. He moved to Kyiv and worked as a conductor and composer; professional and amateur ensembles performed his music. He also taught at the Mykola Lysenko Music and Drama Institute and the People’s Conservatory, and founded several choir groups. After returning to Tulchyn, he established the town’s first music school.
Leontovych is best known for more than 150 choral arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs, including “Shchedryk,” known internationally through the Christmas carol “Carol of the Bells,” as well as “The Piper,” “They Carry the Cossack,” and “The Spinner.” He reshaped folk melodies into original choral works, drawing on European choral techniques and using flexible vocal lines, changes in timbre, harmony, and counterpoint. His arrangements span ritual, sacred, historical, comic, dance, and narrative songs.
He also wrote choral works to Ukrainian poetry and composed settings of liturgical texts, including a Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom. In 1919–20 he worked on his first large-scale symphonic piece, the folk-fantasy opera On Mermaid Eve, based on a fairy tale by Boris Hrinchenko. The opera remained unfinished at his death.