Galitzin, Nicolas Borissovich

-1866

A Russian prince and enthusiastic amateur musician, who played the violoncello well. Nothing is known of the date or place of his birth; his death occurred on his estate in Kurski. He is noteworthy chiefly from the fact that Beethoven dedicated to him an overture and three string quartets and corresponded with him through the composer's lifetime. Galitzin's wife was a skilled pianist, and his son George, born at St. Petersburg in 1823, was a still more active musician, conducting and maintaining a choir of seventy boys, which he organized at Moscow, 1842, and also an orchestra, with which he made concert tours in Germany, France, America and England about 1860, playing mostly Russian music, especially Glinka's and his own. He composed vocal, orchestral, instrumental and chamber-music.