Alexander Glazunov

Biography

Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov was a Russian composer of the late Czarist and the early Bolshevik years.

He was one of the three composers who contributed to the Opera “Prince Igor,” (Knyaz Igor) first performed in St. Petersburg in 1890. Alexander Borodin had begun the work, from an old epic poem about the struggles of Russian Prince Igor Svyatoslavich against invading tribes in the 12th century. Borodin had left the work incomplete when he died in 1887, so the work was completed by Glazunov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

The Metropolitan Opera’s Guide to Recorded Opera says that this is a “rambling, grand, nationalist epic” but not a “dramatically concise stagework.”

After the revolution of November 1917, Glazunov, though steeped in the music of the Czarist era, sought without much success to develop a working relationship with the new authorities, especially with Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky, the minister of education whom Lenin trusted with matters of high culture. After 1928, though, Glazunov was an émigré.