International Arts News: Elena Obraztsova, Jewel of the Bolshoi Opera, Is Dead at 75 - New York Times (17-01-2015) nytimes/2015/01/18/arts/elena-obraztsova-jewel-of-the-bolshoi-opera-is-dead-at-75.html?_r=1 By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY Elena Obraztsova, a mezzo-soprano who survived the siege of Leningrad to become one of the Soviet Union’s greatest opera singers and an international star during the Cold War, died on Jan. 12 at a clinic in Germany. She was 75. The cause was cardiac arrest following complications of pneumonia and an undisclosed illness, said Yekaterina Shikalovich, a spokeswoman for Ms. Obraztsova’s charitable music foundation. Ms. Obraztsova became such an admired favorite of the Soviet cultural establishment that the authorities in Moscow allowed her frequent opportunities to perform abroad as a shining representative of Soviet artistic greatness. She sang at La Scala in Milan, Covent Garden in London, the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the Vienna State Opera, among other stages, and was permitted to record with the conductor Herbert von Karajan. She was given the Lenin Prize and named a People’s Artist of the U.S.S.R. and a Hero of Socialist Labor. Her first performances in New York were triumphant. “Obraztsova Is Great in ‘Aida,’ ” a headline in The New York Times proclaimed on Oct. 14, 1976, after she made her Met debut as Amneris, the daughter of the King of Egypt, played by Philip Booth. Calling her a “major artist” in a rave review, The Times’s music critic Donal Henahan said Ms. Obraztsova had elicited a “happy state of pandemonium” from the Met audience with a “flesh and blood performance that made the other principals in this ‘Aida’ seem mummified by contrast.” At the time, Ms. Obraztsova was the leading mezzo-soprano for the Bolshoi Opera and had made her New York debut with the company to much acclaim the previous season. Her grandest moments at the Bolshoi included performances as the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” and Lyubasha in Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Tsar’s Bride.” Yet she came to tire of those roles and — unusual for an officially approved Soviet star — complained publicly in 1981 about a dearth of new productions at the Bolshoi. At the time, it offered only one opera by Mozart, one by Wagner and none by Bellini or Donizetti. “The Bolshoi shows the same list of operas every year,” Ms. Obraztsova told Literaturnaya Gazeta, implying that that was the reason she spent so much time performing abroad. “I cannot appear in ‘Queen of Spades’ and ‘Tsar’s Bride’ forever.” She also had sharp words for the celebrated Soviet soprano Galina Vishnevskaya in a long-running public feud rife with musical rivalry and political overtones. In her memoirs and in interviews, Ms. Vishnevskaya accused Ms. Obraztsova of denouncing her and the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich when they were under attack by the Soviet authorities for protectingAlexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate and critic of totalitarianism. Ms. Obraztsova denied the accusation. Indeed, she, too, could be stymied by the Soviet system, she said. In a 2011 interview, Ms. Obraztsova spoke of her friendship with Rudolf Nureyev, who defected to the West in 1961, and her unsuccessful attempt to persuade the authorities to let his mother leave the country for surgery. She recalled their conversation, after he had left Russia: “ ‘You,’ he said to me, ‘are so great in Russia, everyone loves you: Go and ask them to let my mother come here, have surgery, and then she’ll go back to Ufa.’ I went to the KGB — can you imagine? Some general met me, and I spent a long time explaining to him that the mother is not to blame that her boy left, and that it’s necessary to let her go for a short time. This guy kept holding back, holding back, and then said: ‘You know, Elena Vasilyevna, I suggest you do your job and sing, and we’ll take care of the rest. I hope we don’t meet again.’ ” Elena Vasilyevna Obraztsova was born in Leningrad on July 7, 1939, less than two months before the outbreak of World War II. While her father was serving at the front, she and her mother survived through much of the Germans’ crushing 900-day siege of Leningrad before they were evacuated. “Yes, there was great suffering, and even as a child I knew that things were bad,” she told The Times during her 1976 visit to New York. “Sometimes young children don’t know how bad things are, but I knew. Yet I believe that when we suffer, we learn better how to love.” In the 1950s, her father’s job took the family to southern Russia, to Taganrog, then to Rostov-on-Don, where Ms. Obraztsova began serious musical studies. She won gold medals in voice competitions in Helsinki and Moscow in 1962 and was still a student at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in Leningrad when, the next year, she made her Bolshoi debut as Marina Mnishek in Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.” She joined the Bolshoi as a soloist in 1964 and, rare for a newcomer, was immediately allowed to accompany the troupe on tours of Japan and Italy, where she sang at La Scala. For many years Ms. Obraztsova had a close creative association with Georgy Sviridov, a neoromantic composer who also found fame within the Soviet cultural system and whose works she often performed in concert. Her talents were captured for the screen by Franco Zeffirelli, who directed her, opposite Plácido Domingo, in a televised production of Bizet’s “Carmen” in 1978 and again in 1982 in a film version of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana.” Ms. Obraztsova also taught, from 1973 to 1994, at the Moscow Conservatory, and more recently in Tokyo and St. Petersburg. From 2007 to 2008 she was the artistic director of the opera troupe at the Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg, and in 2011 she created a charitable foundation to promote music education. She left her first husband, Vyacheslav Makarov, a physicist, for Algis Zhuraitis, a conductor at the Bolshoi, who died in 1998. She is survived by a daughter, Elena, and two grandchildren. In 2005, the newspaper Kultura asked Ms. Obraztsova if she used to have to hide her Christian beliefs in officially atheist Soviet society. “I didn’t hide anything,” she said. “I went to church and wore a cross. And I made the sign of the cross before going on stage. They would get mad at me, of course, but so what?” She added: “God gave us the strength to survive the blockade” of Leningrad, “and then he gave me talent as well. I never asked myself what I should be doing. I knew that I would be an opera singer. It’s all in me. And all of my life is like a gift from God.”
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 03:57:27 +0000
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