The composer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-1857) was the earliest important musical figure of 19th-century musical nationalism in Russia--indeed, Russia's first musical personage of importance. He is known as the father of Russian music.

Mikhail Glinka was born on May 20, 1804, in Novospasskoe, a village in Smolensk Province. From the age of 13 he was raised in St. Petersburg. His training was in the upper-class traditions of the capital. He moved in the circles that passed as enlightened for the time, and he experienced the atmosphere of ferment and question that prevailed in Russia with Western exposure, military and social, after 1812. He was said to have been sympathetic toward the Decembrist uprisings of 1825, yet later times found him politically conservative.

A prodigy, Glinka studied music with visiting foreigners in St. Petersburg. Of them, John Field should be mentioned as a strong influence, although the close relationship reported between the two is...