The story behind the creation of MAGIC SONG. (Carol of the Bells/Shchedryk).

Mykola Dmytrovych Leontovych 13 December 1877 was a Ukrainian composer, conductor, ethnomusicologist and teacher. His music was inspired by Mykola Lysenko and the Ukrainian National Music School. Leontovych specialised in a cappella choral music, ranging from original compositions, to church music, to elaborate arrangements of folk music.

Leontovych was born and raised in the Podolia province of the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine). He was educated as a priest in the Kamianets-Podilskyi Theological Seminary and later furthered his musical education at the Saint Petersburg Court Capella and private lessons with Boleslav Yavorsky. With the independence of the Ukrainian state in the 1917 revolution, Leontovych moved to Kyiv where he worked at the Kyiv Conservatory and the Mykola Lysenko Institute of Music and Drama.

During his lifetime, Leontovych's compositions and arrangements became popular with professional and amateur groups alike across the Ukrainian region of the Russian Empire. Performances of his works in western Europe and North America earned him the nickname "the Ukrainian Bach" in France. Apart from his very popular Shchedryk, Leontovych's music is performed primarily in Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora.

The created Ukrainian Republican Capella has successfully toured Europe and America performing the works of Nikolai Leontovich.

There, he started the city's first music school, since the college where he had worked was closed down by the Bolsheviks. He also began to work on his first major symphonic work, the opera Na Rusalchyn Velykden' (On the water nymph's Great Day).

During the night of 22–23 January 1921, Mykola Leontovych was murdered by Chekist (Soviet state security) agent Afanasy Grishchenko. Leontovych was staying at the home of his parents, whom he was visiting for the Orthodox Feast of the Nativity (25 December in the Julian calendar, which, in the Gregorian calendar, adopted by the USSR only in 1918, falls in January).