1842–1912

Mykola Lysenko

Father of Ukrainian classical music

Composer / musician

Tchaikovsky himself wanted to stage his Taras Bulba, but only in Russian, and the composer said no. Mykola Lysenko laid the foundations of Ukrainian classical music and wrote “Prayer for Ukraine”, which became the country’s spiritual anthem.

Key accomplishments

  • The operas Natalka Poltavka, Taras Bulba and Aeneid, and the children’s operas Koza-Dereza and Winter and Spring
  • The cycle Music to Kobzar: over 80 vocal works to Shevchenko’s poems
  • The choral work “Prayer for Ukraine” (“Great God, the One”, 1885)
  • Founded a school of music and drama in Kyiv (1904)

The opera he wouldn’t give up

Pyotr Tchaikovsky offered to stage Mykola Lysenko’s opera Taras Bulba. There was one condition: it would be sung in Russian. Lysenko refused. For his operas he accepted only Ukrainian, even though the Ems Ukaz of 1876 banned printing Ukrainian even in the words to sheet music. In the composer’s lifetime only fragments of Taras Bulba were staged; the full opera reached the stage in 1924.

How a natural scientist became a composer

Lysenko was born in 1842 in the village of Hrynky in the Poltava region, into a noble family of Cossack descent. He had music lessons from the age of five. He graduated in natural sciences from Kyiv University, then from the Leipzig Conservatory, and went on to study orchestration with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in Saint Petersburg.

All his life Lysenko wrote down folk songs and the melodies of kobzars, and he made hundreds of folk-song arrangements. On that basis he created Ukrainian operas, choral works, art songs and piano music. He set texts by Shevchenko (over 80 works to poems from Kobzar), Kotliarevskyi, Gogol and Lesya Ukrainka.

In 1904 Lysenko founded a school of music and drama in Kyiv, the first in eastern Ukraine to teach in Ukrainian.

Why it matters today

Lysenko proved that Ukrainian music could be classical music. His choral piece “O God the Great, the Only One” (“Prayer for Ukraine”) became the country’s spiritual anthem and is sung on state holidays. The Lviv National Music Academy and the Kharkiv Opera and Ballet Theatre bear his name.