Mikola Shchaglov was born in the Belarusian Smolensk region. After becoming an orphan at a young age, he often stayed with an aunt who was the abbess of a women’s monastery in Tver. There, the boy began singing in the choir and quickly attracted the attention of instructors from the Moscow Synodal Music School, who were searching for talented musicians in the provinces.
Arriving in Minsk in 1936, Shchaglov-Kulikovich became one of the organizers of the Opera Theater and the conductor of its symphonic orchestra. By the beginning of World War II, he was already a well-known composer.
During the German occupation, Mikola Shchaglov headed the music department of the Belarusian Cultural Association. Paradoxically, those years became the most fruitful in the composer’s creativity. Based on librettos by Natallia Arsenieva, he wrote two operas: the lyrical-romantic “Lesnoe Ozero” and the historical “Usiaslau Charadzey,” as well as the operetta “U Vyray.” With Shchaglov’s music, the play “Zatonuty Zvon” based on H. Hauptmann’s work was staged at the Minsk Drama Theater, and “Kastus Kalinowski” by A. Mirovich was rehearsed, which was banned by the German censorship…
In exile, Mikola Shchaglov-Kulikovich continued to serve his muse with inspiration. In 1946, he organized a traveling Belarusian variety theater that toured all of Western Germany. During this time, the composer created music for the Holy Liturgy. Living in the USA since 1950, he published five collections of arrangements of folk melodies and his own songs, including “Belarus, Our Mother-Land” and “In the Thickets” to the verses of Natallia Arsenieva, and “Pahonia” by Maksim Bahdanovich.
Not only in Belarusian emigration circles were the records played by Shchaglov popular. Interestingly, works from them were stolen and re-recorded in the USSR without attribution, as happened, for example, with the folk song “Oi, Erol.”
The rich personal archive of Mikola Shchaglov-Kulikovich awaits its new researchers at the Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library in London.
Source: <www.svaboda.org>