Reinhold Glière was born in Kiev, the second son of a maker of wind instruments who had emigrated from Saxony and married the daughter of his Polish master. Glière’s violin teachers in Kiev included Ševĉik and in 1894, at the age of twenty, he entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied the violin with Hřimalý, and other subjects with Arensky, Konyus, Taneyev and Ippolitov-Ivanov. It was Taneyev who found him two private pupils, Myaskovsky and the eleven-year-old Prokofiev. He taught at the Gnesin School, studied conducting for three years in Berlin, and eventually returned to Kiev, where he became director of the Conservatory. 

In 1920, after the Revolution, he moved back to Moscow, teaching at the Conservatory there until 1941 and interesting himself in the music of the various eastern Soviet republics. Glière continued the romantic Russian tradition, winning immense popularity for his Soviet ballets The Red Poppy and The Bronze Horseman, where he is also able to demonstrate his interest in wider Slavonic musical traditions.