Микола Леонтович

Activity: Culture, Music
Date of Birth: December 13, 1877
Date of Death: January 23, 1921
Navigator: The Long Nineteenth Century

Ukrainian composer, music teacher, and collector of folklore, the creator of Shchedryk, which eventually became one of the most famous Christmas carols in the world — Carol of the Bells.

Mykola Leontovych was born on December 13, 1877 in the village of Monastyrok, Podillia. He was killed in his parents’ home by a Cheka agent on January 23, 1921. A Ukrainian composer, music teacher, and folklorist, he is best known as the creator of “Shchedryk,” which later became the world-famous carol “Carol of the Bells.”
Leontovych, the son of a priest, came from a musical family. His mother, Maria Yosypivna, sang beautifully and knew many Ukrainian songs; his father, Dmytro Fedorovych, played the violin, cello, and guitar and conducted the seminary choir. Mykola received his first education from his father, which largely determined his future life path.
While studying at the primary theological school in Sharhorod, the young man significantly improved his musical knowledge. Having mastered singing from musical notation, he was able to easily read even complex vocal parts. Later, while studying at the theological seminary in Kamianets-Podilskyi, he studied music theory, learned to play various instruments, and became fascinated with arranging folk melodies, taking inspiration from the works of Mykola Lysenko.
After graduating from the seminary, Leontovych refused to take holy orders and instead decided to devote himself to teaching. His first workplace was a school in the village of Chukiv, Vinnytsia region near Nemyriv. There he taught arithmetic, geography, and singing, and also organized a small student orchestra and choir. With his teacher’s salary he bought musical instruments and other materials needed for music lessons. His students sincerely loved him: he was kind and attentive, read books to them aloud, often joked, and sang folk songs together with them even during lessons.
“I was born in Podillia, studied in Podillia, and fell in love with folk songs in Podillia,” the composer once said about himself. In the early 1900s he compiled two collections of folk songs from his native region (the second of which he dedicated to his inspiration, Mykola Lysenko). In 1904 he moved to Hryshyne (now Pokrovsk) in the Donbas, where he worked as a music teacher at a railway workers’ school. There he also organized an amateur choir with an orchestra and held free concerts that became very popular among local residents. During the Russian Revolution of 1905, Leontovych conducted a workers’ choir that performed at political rallies. This attracted the attention of the tsarist secret police, and the composer was forced to return to his native Podillia.
His next workplace was the women’s school in Tulchyn for daughters of priests. While teaching music there, Leontovych continued his own studies under the guidance of the music theorist Boleslav Yavorsky, whom he periodically visited in Kyiv and Moscow. During this period he composed a number of choral arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs, including the famous “Shchedryk.”
After World War I, the composer lived in Kyiv. There his career rapidly advanced. He composed music, taught at the Mykola Lysenko Music and Drama Institute and the People’s Conservatory in Kyiv, and organized choral groups.
In 1919, the forces of Anton Denikin entered Kyiv. Fearing repression against the Ukrainian intelligentsia, Leontovych was forced to leave the city and return to Tulchyn. There he founded a music school and began working on his first major symphonic composition — the opera Na rusalchyn Velykden (“On the Mermaid’s Easter”), based on a tale by Borys Hrinchenko. It was while working on this piece that death overtook him. For many years the circumstances of his death were surrounded by a dark veil of secrecy until the collapse of the Soviet state made it possible to access previously classified documents.
On the night of January 22–23, Leontovych was staying with his parents in the village of Markivka, Vinnytsia region while resting between Christmas performances. A stranger knocked on the door, showing identification as an agent of the Cheka (the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage). He claimed he was tracking down bandits and asked to stay the night. Leontovych’s father took pity on the unexpected guest and allowed him to sleep in the same room as Mykola.
In the morning, the Cheka agent “repaid” the family’s hospitality: he shot the composer with a rifle in his bed, threatened the other family members with a weapon, tied them up, robbed the house, and fled.
The Soviet authorities carefully concealed the crime. However, the sensational murder of a famous composer — especially in the context of the worldwide popularity of “Shchedryk” — could not go unnoticed. Artists and scholars both in Ukraine and abroad tried to uncover the truth, gathering testimonies and searching for documents. In response, the Soviet system created numerous “refutations,” which only further confused and distorted the facts. Only in recent decades, after careful study of secret archives, has it become clear that the murder of Leontovych — a world-renowned promoter of Ukrainian culture — was not an accident but a deliberately planned crime.

Author: Olha Herasymenko