Character
Mykola Leontovych was highly critical of himself. According to his first biographer Oles' Chapkivskyi, a contemporary of the composer, Leontovych would sometimes work on one choral setting without letting anyone else see it for up to four years. After the publication of his "Second Compilation of Songs from Podolia", he changed his mind and was not fully satisfied with it, and as a result he bought all 300 copies and had them destroyed.
Chapkivskyi also described LeontŠ¾vych as having a shy personality, saying "He abstained from fame, feared attention and advertisement." On the other hand, Chapkivskyi claimed that Leontovych's jealousy, fear of competition, and fear of non-acceptance from the established musical society, caused the music of Leontovych to be little known.
Zynoviy Yaropud of the Kamianets-Podilskyi State Pedagogical University writes that "all of contemporaries called him a quiet, gentle person. He was not an active leader of the national-revolutionary movement, which revealed in the years of 1917-1921 a whole handful of prominent fighters for the Ukrainian republic," revealing that the composer was politically quiet, but not indifferent.
Leontovych's friend, O. Buzhanskiy, recalls that the composer was "always full of humor; spoke so that everyone was laughing to tears, but he remained serious and stayed calm." Stetsenko also described Leontovych to be a "witty storyteller" and that his students at the Church Educator's School in Tulchyn were "in love with him" because of his storytelling.
Read more about this topic: Mykola Leontovych
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