Glinka, Mikhail (Ivanovich)

(born June 1, 1804, Novospasskoye, Russia—died Feb. 15, 1857, Berlin, Prussia ) Russian composer. He studied in Italy and Berlin, and in 1836 his first opera, A Life for the Tsar, immediately earned him a reputation as Russia's leading composer. Elements of Russian folk music were heard even more clearly in the opera Ruslan and Ludmila (1842) and the orchestral work Kamarinskaya (1848). The influence of these works on later Russian composers, including Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, was significant, and Glinka is regarded as the father of the Russian national school.

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica