Leontovych Mykola Dmytrovych (December 1 (13), 1877, Monastirok village, Bratslav District, Podil Province, Russian Empire - January 23, 1921, Markivka Village, Haysyn District, Podil District, Ukrainian SSR, USSR) - Ukrainian composer, choir conductor, pianist, teacher, collector of musical folklore, public figure.

The author of well-known choral arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs "Shchedryk", "Dudaryk", "The Cossack is carried", "Oh from behind the stone mountain" and others. His Christmas carol Shchedrik has been translated into many languages and is known in the English-speaking world as Carol of the Bells.

Childhood of the composer

He was born in the village of Monastirok, Bratslav district, Podilsk province, in the family of a village priest, Dmytro Feofanovich Leontovich.

He spent his early childhood in the village of Shershnyakh, Tyvriv Volost, Vinnytsia County. Regarding the house in Shershny where the Leontovychs lived, there are discussions - yes, according to some, it is a stone and brick building in the center of the village, decorated with a corresponding memorial plaque, and which needs major repairs, according to other sources, it is a wooden house, which burned down in 1898.

Leontovych received his primary musical education from his father, Dmytro Fedorovych, who sang beautifully, played the cello, violin, and guitar, and for some time directed the choir of seminarians. Mother, Maria Yosypivna (née Yatvytska), had a beautiful voice and often sang Ukrainian folk songs, her brother and sisters also studied music from childhood and later became singers and musicians.

In 1887, Leontovych entered the Nemyriv Gymnasium. In 1888, due to a lack of funds, his father transferred him to the Shargorod primary theological school, where the pupils were kept on a full board. At the school, he mastered singing by notes and could freely read complex parts in church choral works.

In 1892, Leontovych entered the Podilsk Theological Seminary in Kamianets-Podilskyi, where he studied music theory and choral singing, mastered the violin, piano, and some wind instruments, began to arrange folk melodies, taking Mykola Lysenko's arrangement as a model.

The first creative steps

In June 1899, Leontovych, having studied for two years in the sixth grade, graduated from the theological seminary and decided to work as a teacher in rural schools and at the same time improve his musical education on his own. In the village of Chukovi, Bratslav District, Podilsk Province, he organized an amateur symphony orchestra that performed Ukrainian melodies and pieces by Ukrainian and Russian composers. In 1901, he published the first collection of songs from Podillia. In 1903, the second collection of Podil songs with a dedication to Mykola Lysenko was published.

Mykola Leontovych

In the fall of 1904, he left Podillia and moved to Donbas, where he got a job as a teacher of singing and music at a local railway school. During the 1905 revolution, Leontovych organized a workers' choir that performed at rallies. Leontovych's activities attracted the attention of the police, and he was forced to return to Podillia, to the city of Tulchyn, where he taught music and singing at the Tulchyn diocesan women's school for the daughters of village priests. Since 1909, Leontovych has been studying under the guidance of the famous music theorist Boleslav Yavorskyi, whom he periodically visits in Kyiv and Moscow. At that time, he created many choral compositions, including the famous "Schedryk", as well as "Roosters are drinking", "She had only one daughter", "Dudarik", "Oi izhilda zorya" and others. In Tulchyn, he met the composer Kyryll Stetsenko. In 1916, with the choir of Kyiv University, he performed his version of Shchedryka, which brought him great success with the Kyiv public.

Kyiv period

With the establishment of the Ukrainian People's Republic, Leontovych moved from Tulchyn to Kyiv, where he began active work as a conductor and composer. A number of his works have been included in their repertoire by professional and amateur ensembles of Ukraine. At one of the concerts, "Legend" by Mykola Voronoi (Leontovych's original work) was a great success. After the arrival of the Bolsheviks, Leontovych worked for some time in the music committee of the People's Commissariat of Education, taught at the Mykola Lysenko Music and Drama Institute, together with the composer and conductor Hryhoriy Veryovka, worked at the People's Conservatory, on preschool education courses, and organized several choir groups.

Return to Vinnytsia

During the capture of Kyiv on August 31, 1919 by the Denikinites, who were persecuting the Ukrainian intelligentsia, he was forced to flee to Tulchyn. Founds the first music school in Tulchyn. In 1919-1920, he worked on his first major symphonic work, the folk-fantasy opera "To the Little Mermaid Easter" based on the fairy tale of the same name by Borys Grinchenko.

In the fall of 1920, a choir tour took place in Tulchyn under the leadership of Kyril Stetsenko and Pavel Tychyna as the second conductor. During the concerts, the band performed Leontovych's works.

In the last months of his life, Leontovych was finishing the opera "Na rusalchyn Easter".

The "mystery" of death

Over the past 80 years, many publications have been devoted to the death of Mykola Leontovich. In their details, all these accounts are often based on the accounts of eyewitness relatives and sharply contrast and contradict each other. This became clear already with the overthrow of the Soviet-communist government at the time of Ukraine's independence, when classified materials from those times became available, which showed the distortion and involvement of publications in Soviet times, which were used to hide the destruction of a talented Ukrainian composer by the then power structures - the so-called Cheka. The only thing that never became clear was why the Chekists resorted to such a brutal act, what was the reason for the composer's murder?

Monument to Mykola Leontovych in Tulchyn.

On the night of January 23, 1921, the composer was staying with his father in the village of Markivka, Ghaisinsky district, where he was killed by the Cheka agent Athanasius Hryshchenko, who asked to stay overnight in the house, claiming to be a Chekist fighting against banditry. In the morning, he robbed a house and shot Mykola Leontovich. The text of the report revealing the name of the composer's killer was made public only in the 1990s