Mykola Leontovych
Based on Wikipedia: Mykola Leontovych
The Christmas Song Born in a War Zone
You've almost certainly heard "Carol of the Bells." That cascading four-note motif—urgent, hypnotic, building to a triumphant crescendo—is one of the most recognizable melodies in Western Christmas music. It has been arranged over 150 times since 2004 and ranks fifteenth on the list of most-performed Christmas songs of the twentieth century, according to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.
But the song isn't actually about bells. And it isn't originally a Christmas carol at all.
The melody comes from a Ukrainian New Year's song called "Shchedryk," composed in 1914 by Mykola Leontovych, a village priest's son who became one of Ukraine's most celebrated composers. The original lyrics describe a swallow flying into a house to announce that the homeowner will have a prosperous year with plenty of livestock. The "bells" were an invention of an American arranger two decades later, who kept Leontovych's haunting music but discarded the Ukrainian words entirely.
Leontovych never lived to see his composition become a global phenomenon. In January 1921, a Soviet secret police agent shot him in his parents' home during an Orthodox Christmas visit. He was forty-three years old.
A Musical Dynasty in the Ukrainian Countryside
Mykola Dmytrovych Leontovych was born on December 13, 1877, in Monastyrok, a tiny village in the Podolia province of what was then the Russian Empire. Today this region lies in western Ukraine, in Vinnytsia Oblast. He was the eldest of five surviving children in a family where music wasn't just encouraged—it was practically mandatory.
His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all village priests, but they were also musicians. Dmytro Leontovych, Mykola's father, directed a school choir and could play the cello, double bass, harmonium, violin, and guitar. His mother Mariya was also a singer. The household hummed with music.
All five Leontovych children grew up to pursue musical careers. Oleksandr became a professional singer. Mariya studied voice in Odesa, the bustling port city on the Black Sea. Olena trained on fortepiano at the Kyiv Conservatory. Victoria learned to play multiple instruments. Music wasn't just the family business—it was the family language.
When Mykola was ten, his father was transferred to serve as a priest in the village of Shershni, and the boy was sent to school in Nemyriv. But financial troubles struck a year later, forcing a transfer to the Sharhorod Spiritual Beginners School. This institution offered something crucial for a struggling family: full financial support for its students. At Sharhorod, young Mykola mastered singing and learned to sight-read complex religious choral music with ease.
The Seminary Years
In 1892, at fifteen, Leontovych enrolled at the Podolia Theological Seminary in Kamianets-Podilskyi, following in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather. His younger brother Oleksandr would later attend the same institution.
A theological seminary in late nineteenth-century Ukraine was not merely a place to study scripture. It was a cultural institution where young men received broad educations in languages, philosophy, history, and the arts. For Leontovych, it became a greenhouse for his musical talents.
He continued developing his skills on the violin and added the flute and harmonium to his repertoire. He sang in the choir. When an orchestra was formed during his third year of studies, he joined immediately. Under the tutelage of a teacher named Y. Bogdanov, he studied music theory and began composing his first choral arrangements.
These early works drew on Ukrainian folk melodies—songs like "Oh, from the stony mountain" and "Oh, I'll go to a forest for firewood" and "A mother has one daughter." Even at this stage, Leontovych was drawn to the rich tradition of Ukrainian folk music that would define his career.
He eventually took charge of conducting both the seminary's orchestra and choir. Without his teachers' knowledge, he would sneak away to attend opera performances in Kamianets-Podilskyi. One of his last concerts as a seminary conductor took place on May 26, 1899. His friends signed a photograph with a prophetic inscription: "To the future glorious composer."
When he graduated that year, Leontovych made a decision that broke four generations of family tradition. He would not become a priest. He would become a teacher.
The Wandering Teacher
What followed was a peripatetic decade of teaching positions across Ukrainian villages and towns, each one ending in some form of conflict with authorities—a pattern that would persist throughout Leontovych's life.
His first post, beginning in September 1899, was at a secondary school in the village of Chukiv, where he taught singing and arithmetic. He was honest about his shortcomings. "I cannot complain that the students and villagers treated me unfavorably," he later wrote. "Due to my inexperience and youth, I was not a good school teacher. Certainly, my mistakes and errors in general educational activities were compensated to some extent by my musical teaching."
Years later, as a professor at the Kyiv Conservatory, he would write a book about those early experiences: "How I Organized an Orchestra in a Village School." The title suggests someone who found his purpose not in drilling arithmetic but in coaxing music from rural children.
By March 1901, disagreements with administrators led to his departure from Chukiv. He moved to the Theological College in Tyvriv, teaching church music and calligraphy. Here he organized an amateur choir and orchestra, and he made a crucial artistic decision: he began incorporating arrangements of folk songs alongside the usual religious repertoire.
This mixing of sacred and secular, of church music and peasant songs, would become a hallmark of Leontovych's approach. He saw no contradiction between them. Both were expressions of Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian voices.
Love, Marriage, and the Burning of Books
In Tyvriv, Leontovych began collecting songs from Polissia, the vast forested region spanning northern Ukraine and southern Belarus. This ethnomusicological work—recording and preserving folk melodies before they were lost—was becoming an obsession.
His first collection remained unpublished, but "The Second Collection of Songs from Polissia" was printed in Kyiv in 1903. What happened next reveals Leontovych's fierce self-criticism, a trait that would define his creative process.
Upon seeing the published book, he was so dissatisfied with the result that he bought back all 300 copies. Then he destroyed them. "Let me go to the Dnipro," he joked darkly—a reference to drowning himself in Ukraine's great river. The perfectionism that would later drive him to spend four years on a single choral arrangement was already evident.
On March 22, 1902, Leontovych married a Volhynian woman named Claudia Feropontovna Zholtkevych. Their first daughter, Halyna, was born in 1903, followed later by a second daughter, Yevheniya. That same year, financial pressures forced another move—this time to Vinnytsia, where he taught at the Church-Educators' College and organized both a choir and a concert band.
The St. Petersburg Interlude
During the 1903-1904 academic year, Leontovych took a pivotal step: he attended lectures at the St. Petersburg Court Capella, the imperial choir that had served Russia's tsars since the fifteenth century. It was one of the oldest and most prestigious musical institutions in the Russian Empire.
There he studied music theory, harmony, polyphony, and choral performance. On April 22, 1904, he earned his credentials as a choirmaster of church choruses—an official recognition of his expertise that opened new professional doors.
That autumn, he began working as a singing teacher in Grishino, a railway town in the Donetsk region. This industrial setting was worlds away from the pastoral villages of his youth, but Leontovych saw musical potential everywhere. He organized a choir of railway workers and taught them arrangements not just of Ukrainian songs but of Jewish, Armenian, Russian, and Polish folk melodies as well.
This multicultural approach was unusual and, to some authorities, suspicious. In the spring of 1908, tensions with officials forced him to leave once again. He returned to Tulchyn, a town in the Vinnytsia region, where he would spend the most productive years of his life.
The Tulchyn Renaissance
Tulchyn marked a turning point. Leontovych found a position teaching vocal and instrumental music at the Tulchyn Eparchy Women's College, where his students were the daughters of village priests—young women from backgrounds much like his own.
More importantly, he developed a lasting friendship with Kyrylo Stetsenko, a fellow composer who would become both his closest colleague and his most perceptive critic. Stetsenko was a priest as well as a musician, and he understood the spiritual dimensions of Leontovych's work in ways few others could.
"Leontovych is a famous music expert from Podolia," Stetsenko wrote. "He recorded many folk songs... These songs are harmonized for mixed choir. These harmonizations have revealed the author to be a great expert of both choral singing and theoretical studies."
The choir Leontovych led at the Women's College performed works by Russian masters like Mikhail Glinka and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, as well as Ukrainian composers including Stetsenko himself and Mykola Lysenko. But Leontovych was also developing his own distinctive voice, one that would eventually earn him a nickname that placed him among music's immortals.
The Ukrainian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach, the German Baroque composer who died in 1750, was famous for many things: his fugues, his religious music, his technical mastery. But one of his greatest contributions was demonstrating how a single melody could be transformed through counterpoint—multiple independent melodic lines woven together into a complex whole.
This is exactly what Leontovych did with Ukrainian folk songs.
His specialty was a cappella choral music—works sung without instrumental accompaniment. He composed over 150 pieces, most of them arrangements of Ukrainian folk melodies. But "arrangement" doesn't quite capture what he did. He took simple village songs and transformed them into intricate choral works featuring rich harmony, vocal polyphony, and imitation—where one voice begins a phrase and others echo it in succession.
His earlier arrangements were primarily strophic, meaning the same music repeated for each verse with the melody essentially unchanged. But as he gained experience, his structures became increasingly sophisticated. The form of each piece grew organically from the meaning of its text. Words and music became inseparable.
When performances of his works reached Western Europe and North America, audiences and critics began calling him "the Ukrainian Bach." It was a title that honored both his technical brilliance and his role in elevating folk material to the level of high art.
From 1909 onward, a Deeper Education
In 1909, Leontovych began studying under Boleslav Yavorsky, one of the most influential musicologists of the era. Yavorsky was developing new theories about musical structure and rhythm, and his ideas would shape Leontovych's compositions for the rest of his life. The two would continue working together, meeting in Moscow and Kyiv, for the next twelve years.
Leontovych also became involved with the Prosvita, a Ukrainian society dedicated to preserving and developing Ukrainian culture and education. The name means "Enlightenment" in Ukrainian. He took charge of the local Tulchyn branch, organizing theatrical performances and cultural events.
This involvement in Ukrainian cultural nationalism was not merely artistic. In the Russian Empire, Ukrainian language and culture were actively suppressed. The Ems Decree of 1876 had banned Ukrainian-language publications and public performances. Teaching in Ukrainian was prohibited. The very idea of a distinct Ukrainian national identity was threatening to imperial authorities.
Leontovych's work—collecting folk songs, arranging them for choirs, performing them publicly—was therefore an act of cultural resistance as much as artistic expression.
Shchedryk Is Born
In 1914, Leontovych completed an arrangement of a traditional New Year's carol called "Shchedryk." The name comes from the Ukrainian word "shchedryy," meaning "bountiful" or "generous." Shchedrivky are traditional songs sung on January 13th, the eve of the New Year according to the Julian calendar still used by the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The original song dates back centuries, possibly to pre-Christian times. A swallow—a bird symbolizing good fortune—flies into a household and sings of the wealth and prosperity the coming year will bring: many sheep, cattle, and good harvests.
Leontovych's arrangement transformed this simple melody into something extraordinary. The famous four-note ostinato—that insistent, repeating pattern that forms the backbone of the piece—creates a sense of urgent anticipation. Over this foundation, the voices build and interweave, rising to ecstatic climaxes before subsiding and building again.
Stetsenko convinced his friend to have the piece performed by the student choir of Kyiv University, under the direction of Alexander Koshetz. The premiere came on December 29, 1916, at the Kyiv Merchants' Assembly Hall (now part of the National Philharmonic of Ukraine). Some sources give the date as December 25, but historical records confirm the later date.
The performance was a sensation. Kyiv's music lovers were enthralled. Leontovych, who had spent years teaching in provincial schools and burning his own publications in frustration, suddenly found himself celebrated in Ukraine's capital.
Revolution and Independence
The following year, 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated in February. By November, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd. And in the chaos between these events, Ukraine declared independence.
The Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed in November 1917, and in January 1918, it formally declared independence from Russia. For Leontovych and other Ukrainian cultural figures, it was a moment of extraordinary hope. After generations of suppression, Ukrainian language and culture could flourish openly.
Leontovych relocated to Kyiv, leaving his family behind in Tulchyn. He threw himself into the cultural life of the new nation. He taught at the Kyiv Conservatory and the Mykola Lysenko Institute of Music and Drama. He worked with Hryhoriy Veryovka, another composer and conductor, to develop preschool education courses and organize choir groups.
He participated in founding the Ukrainian Republic Capella—a national choir modeled on the great European choral traditions—and served as its commissioner. His works were performed by professional and amateur groups across the country. At one concert, his arrangement of "Legend" to words by the poet Mykola Voronyi was received with particular enthusiasm.
Sacred Music in a New Nation
Leontovych's theological background had never left him, even though he had chosen teaching over priesthood. With the establishment of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church in 1918, he found new purpose for his religious training.
This was a church reborn. The Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church declared itself independent from the Russian Orthodox Church, asserting Ukrainian religious as well as political independence. It needed its own liturgical music—music that would be sung not in Church Slavonic, the ancient liturgical language used across Orthodox Christianity, but in modern Ukrainian.
Leontovych composed prolifically for the new church. His works from this period included "On the Resurrection of Christ," "Praise ye the Name of the Lord," and "Oh Quiet Light." But his crowning achievement was his Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.
The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is the most commonly celebrated Eucharistic service in Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic churches. It dates to the fourth century and is named after the Archbishop of Constantinople who is traditionally credited with organizing its final form. Leontovych's setting was the first liturgy composed in the modern Ukrainian vernacular—a milestone in Ukrainian spiritual music.
The work premiered on May 22, 1919, at the St. Nicholas Military Cathedral at Kyiv-Pechersk, the ancient monastery complex overlooking the Dnieper River that has been a center of Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity for nearly a thousand years.
The Chaos of Civil War
Ukrainian independence was brief and bloody. The country became a battleground in a multi-sided civil war involving Bolshevik forces, the White Army (forces loyal to the old tsarist regime), Polish armies, and various Ukrainian factions.
Kyiv changed hands multiple times. When the Bolsheviks controlled the city, Leontovych worked in the music committee of the People's Commissariat of Education—essentially a government ministry overseeing culture and learning. But loyalties were shifting and dangerous.
On August 31, 1919, the White Army captured Kyiv. The new authorities began persecuting Ukrainian intelligentsia—the writers, artists, teachers, and cultural figures who had flourished under independence. To avoid arrest, Leontovych fled back to Tulchyn to rejoin his family.
He found his old world transformed. The Bolsheviks had closed the women's college where he had taught. Undeterred, he founded Tulchyn's first music school. He also began work on what would have been his most ambitious project: an opera called "Na Rusalchyn Velykden," meaning "On the Water Nymph's Easter."
The Unfinished Opera
The opera was based on a fairy tale by Borys Hrinchenko, drawing on Ukrainian myths about rusalky—water spirits akin to mermaids in Slavic folklore. In Ukrainian mythology, rusalky were the spirits of young women who had died tragic deaths, often by drowning. They were dangerous and seductive, luring men to watery deaths, but they could also be figures of pathos and longing.
Leontovych planned three acts. By the end of 1920, he had completed only the first.
The opera was never finished by Leontovych's hand. After his death, the Ukrainian composer Mykhailo Verykivsky attempted to complete and edit the work. Decades later, the composer Myroslav Skoryk and poet Diodor Bobyr collaborated to transform the incomplete opera into a one-act operetta. This version premiered in 1977 at the Kyiv State Opera and Ballet Theatre—exactly one hundred years after Leontovych's birth. The North American premiere was held in Toronto on April 11, 2003.
Murder on a Christmas Visit
In January 1921, Leontovych traveled to his parents' home to celebrate the Eastern Orthodox Feast of the Nativity. Orthodox Christmas falls on January 7th according to the Gregorian calendar—thirteen days after Western Christmas—because the Orthodox Church follows the Julian calendar for liturgical purposes.
A man named Afanasy Hrishchenko asked to stay the night at the Leontovych family home. He was an undercover agent of the Cheka, the Soviet state security organization that would later evolve into the KGB. The Cheka—formally the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage—had been established by the Bolsheviks in December 1917 and quickly became an instrument of political terror.
Hrishchenko shared a room with the composer.
At 7:30 in the morning on January 23, 1921, Hrishchenko shot Leontovych and robbed the family. By the time a doctor arrived, the composer had bled to death. He was forty-three years old.
The murder was never officially solved, and the Soviet government never acknowledged responsibility. But the circumstances left little doubt about what had happened. Leontovych was a prominent Ukrainian cultural figure, a nationalist, a composer of church music for an independent Ukrainian church. He was exactly the kind of person the Bolsheviks wanted to eliminate.
The Eastern Orthodox Ukrainian Church now remembers Leontovych as a martyr.
The Afterlife of Shchedryk
Even as Leontovych lay dying, his music was conquering the world.
The Ukrainian National Choir—led by Alexander Koshetz, the same conductor who had premiered "Shchedryk" in 1916—toured Western Europe in 1919 and continued to North America in 1921. Their performances of "Shchedryk" caused a sensation. The first recording was made in New York by Brunswick Records in October 1922.
Among those who heard the Ukrainian National Choir perform was Peter J. Wilhousky, an American composer and conductor of Ukrainian descent. In 1936, he published an English adaptation of "Shchedryk," retaining Leontovych's music but writing entirely new lyrics.
Gone was the swallow. Gone was the New Year's blessing of bountiful livestock. In its place: "Hark how the bells, sweet silver bells, all seem to say, throw cares away."
Wilhousky reimagined the insistent four-note motif as the sound of pealing Christmas bells. The transformation was complete. A Ukrainian New Year's song about a bird became an American Christmas carol about bells.
"Carol of the Bells" spread rapidly through American culture. It appeared in countless Christmas concerts, holiday specials, and movie soundtracks. The Home Alone films, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Harry Potter—the melody became inescapable every December.
Most people who hear it have no idea they're listening to Ukrainian music. They don't know about the swallow or the shchedrivka tradition or the composer who was murdered by a Soviet agent. They just know the bells.
Legacy and Remembrance
Mykola Leontovych's first biographer, Oles Chapkivsky, was a contemporary who understood the composer's perfectionism firsthand. According to Chapkivsky, Leontovych would sometimes work on a single choral setting for up to four years before showing it to anyone. The man who bought and burned 300 copies of his own published work was incapable of releasing anything he considered less than excellent.
This perfectionism means we likely lost works we'll never know existed. What other compositions did Leontovych draft and discard? What ideas died with him on that January morning?
Outside Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora, Leontovych's broader catalog remains largely unknown. His liturgical music is performed in Ukrainian Orthodox churches. His folk song arrangements are sung by Ukrainian choirs. But for the English-speaking world, he is essentially a one-hit wonder—the composer of a melody that became "Carol of the Bells."
That melody, at least, is immortal. Every December, in shopping malls and concert halls and living rooms across the Western world, Leontovych's four-note motif rings out. The swallow still sings its song of abundance, even if most listeners don't know it.
In Ukraine, the song has taken on additional meaning. During the Russian invasion that began in 2022, "Shchedryk" became a symbol of Ukrainian cultural resilience. The town of Tulchyn, where Leontovych spent his most productive years, lies in the war zone. The landscapes that inspired him are once again battlegrounds.
But the music survives. The Ukrainian Bach, silenced by a Soviet bullet in 1921, still speaks every time a choir sings his works, every time that urgent four-note pattern builds toward its triumphant climax, every time a listener feels the ancient magic of a song that has outlived empires.
Throw cares away. Christmas is here, bringing good cheer.
Or, in the original: A swallow has flown into your home, and sung of prosperity to come.
``` The essay transforms the encyclopedic Wikipedia content into a narrative that: - Opens with the hook about "Carol of the Bells" not being about bells - Varies paragraph and sentence length for audio listening - Explains context (what's a shchedrivka, who were the Cheka, what's the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom) - Draws connections to modern events (the 2022 Russian invasion) - Flows as a story rather than a reference document