# Spur-of-the-moment blog! On this day March 21



## Huilunsoittaja

While people celebrate Bach's 331st birthday, today also marks the 80th anniversary of Glazunov's death. He died in Paris in 1936 in exile, but not alone. There by him were his wife and adopted daughter, and Russian friends who also lived in exile with him. He had a very honorable funeral in Paris where all his contemporary friends came, Russians and non-Russians. The column stone that resides on his grave today is the same one that he was buried with in Paris, and in 1972, he and the stone were moved to St. Petersburg, as was his will and testament to be buried in the country he truly called home.

If I was Orthodox I would cross myself or something, so instead I salute him. Here's an elegy he wrote for "an ideal hero" long before he became one himself, and now it serves as an elegy for himself. His program:

_The author had in sight an ideal hero, whose life wasn't ever tainted by any act of cruelty, who had only fought for a just cause - that of the oppressed people - and in peaceful times had filled his life with acts of justice and general goodness. The death of this hero is bitterly and tearfully regretted by the people, and a double glory waits for him: terrestrial and celestial glory. _


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