Great Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya dies at 86

Rus­sian opera legend Galina Vish­nevskaya has died today, Decem­ber 11, at the age of 86.

Vish­nevskaya was born in St Peters­berg (Len­in­grad) 25 Octo­ber 1926, and cast out by her par­ents at six weeks. She was raised in abso­lute poverty by her grand­mother. As a ten year old Galina was presen­ted with a gramo­phone and an album of Eugene One­gin. This was her pass­port from the harsh­ness of real­ity to an “ima­gin­ary world of beauty, magical sounds and unearthly pur­ity”, she said in her auto­bi­o­graphy Galina — a Rus­sian Story.

She made her pro­fes­sional stage début in 1944 singing oper­etta, then won a com­pet­i­tion at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1952 singing Rachmaninoff’s song “O, Do Not Grieve” and Verdi’s aria “O pat­ria mia” from Aida. She joined the com­pany soon after.

In Rus­sia in 1955 she mar­ried the cel­list Mstis­lav Rostrop­ovich and the couple had two daugh­ters, Olga (1956) and Elena (1958). Dur­ing the 1950s and 60s, Rus­sia was under­go­ing some major cul­tural changes and lib­er­al­iz­a­tion known as “The Thaw”, ini­ti­ated by Nikita Khrushchev. So in 1961, she made her Met­ro­pol­itan Opera début as Aida and the fol­low­ing year she made her début at the Royal Opera House with the same role. In 1964 she made her La Scala début as Liù in Tur­an­dot (with Birgit Nils­son and Franco Corelli).

In 1969 Rostrop­ovich and Vish­nevskaya saved their friend, dis­sid­ent writer Aleksandr Solzhen­it­syn from pro­sec­u­tion: Solzhen­it­syn needed a place to hide from the Soviet author­it­ies and lived secretly at Rostropovich’s dacha out­side Moscow. The Soviet Com­mun­ists were so out­raged that Rostrop­ovich and Vish­nevskaya were banned from per­form­ing and their musical activ­ity was reduced to teach­ing. In 1974, after years of struggle with the Soviet dic­tat­or­ship, Rostrop­ovich and Vish­nevskaya fled the Soviet Union. In exile, they were liv­ing the artistic free­dom they had so longed for, and did not want to go back until the fall of the oppress­ive Soviet régime. They settled in the United States and Paris. In 1982, Vish­nevskaya bade farewell to the opera stage, in Paris, as Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene One­gin, the opera she had heard as a child.

In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev restored their cit­izen­ship of Rus­sia (then Soviet Union), allow­ing Rostrop­ovich and Vish­nevskaya to go back home. Their return happened dur­ing the most dra­matic events of the col­lapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Rostrop­ovich died in 2007 end­ing not just a sen­ti­mental rela­tion­ship, but a musical one.

Vish­nevskaya made many record­ings, includ­ing Eugene One­gin (1956 and 1970), Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death (1961 and 1976), Britten’s War Requiem (writ­ten by Brit­ten for her, with Sir Peter Pears and Diet­rich Fischer-Dieskau, con­duc­ted by the com­poser; 1963), The Poet’s Echo (1968), Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1970 and 1987), Puccini’s Tosca (1976), Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades (with Regina Res­nik, 1976), Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1978; Vish­nevskaya and Rostrop­ovich were friends of Dmitri Shos­takovich), Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta (with Nic­olai Gedda, 1984), and Prokofiev’s War and Peace (1986)

In 2006, she was fea­tured in Alex­an­der Sokurov’s touch­ing doc­u­ment­ary Elegy of a life: Rostrop­ovich, Vish­nevskaya.

Photo: Galina Vish­nevskaya in 2008 by Alexey Yushenkov

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