Glinka first became interested in music at age 10 or 11, when he heard his uncle's private orchestra. He studied at the Chief Pedagogic Institute at St. Petersburg (1818–22) and took piano lessons with the Irish pianist and composer John Field (Field, John). He worked for four years in the Ministry of Communications but was uninterested in an official career. As a dilettante he composed songs and a certain amount of chamber music. Three years in Italy brought him under the spell of the composers Vincenzo Bellini (Bellini, Vincenzo) and Gaetano Donizetti (Donizetti, Gaetano), though ultimately homesickness led him to the idea of writing music “in Russian.”

He studied composition seriously for six months in Berlin, where he began his Sinfonia per l'orchestra sopra due motive russe (1834; “Symphony for Orchestra on Two Russian Motifs”). Recalled to Russia by his father's death, he married and began to compose the opera that first won him fame, A Life for the Tsar (later renamed Ivan Susanin), produced in 1836. During this period, Glinka composed some of his best songs, and in 1842 his second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila, was produced. The exotic subject and boldly original music of Ruslan won neither favour nor popular acclaim, although Franz Liszt (Liszt, Franz) was struck by the novelty of the music.

Disgruntled, and with his marriage broken, Glinka left Russia in 1844. He had the satisfaction of hearing excerpts from both his operas performed in Paris under Hector Berlioz (Berlioz, Hector) (1845, as the first performance of Russian music in the West) and other conductors. From Paris he went to Spain, where he stayed until May 1847, collecting the materials used in his two “Spanish overtures,” the capriccio brillante on the Jota aragonesa (1845; “Aragonese Jota”) and Summer Night in Madrid (1848). Between 1852 and 1854 he was again abroad, mostly in Paris, until the outbreak of the Crimean War drove him home again. He then wrote his highly entertaining Zapiski (Memoirs; first published in St. Petersburg, 1887), which give a remarkable self-portrait of his indolent, amiable, hypochondriacal character. His last notable composition was Festival Polonaise for Tsar Alexander II's coronation ball (1855).

Glinka has been described as a dilettante of genius. His slender output is considered the foundation of most later Russian music of value. Ruslan and Lyudmila provided models of lyrical melody and colourful orchestration on which Mily Balakirev (Balakirev, Mily), Aleksandr Borodin (Borodin, Aleksandr), and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay) formed their styles. Glinka's orchestral composition Kamarinskaya (1848) was said by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich) to be the acorn from which the oak of later Russian symphonic music grew.