Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya

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Vishnevskaya (2008)
Vishnevskaya in 1965 with her husband Mstislav Rostropovich

Galina Vishnevskaya ( Russian Галина Павловна Вишневская ., Scientific transliteration Galina Pavlovna Višnevskaja *  25. October 1926 in Leningrad ; † 11 December 2012 in Moscow ) was a Russian opera singer (lyric to dramatic soprano, originally operetta soprano ). Since 1955 she was the wife of the cellist and conductor Mstislaw Leopoldowitsch Rostropowitsch , with whom she had two daughters.

Life

Vishnevskaya made his operetta debut in Leningrad in 1944, but experienced a breakthrough and change in 1952 as Leonore in Fidelio at the Bolshoi Theater . In the 1960s and 1970s she appeared internationally in lyrical ( Liù in Turandot ) and dramatic roles ( Tosca in Tosca ) and appeared in numerous recordings, including as Marina in Boris Godunow under Herbert von Karajan .

In 1979 she recorded her mutual friend Shostakovich in the original version under the direction of Rostropovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk . In 1982 she left the stage at the Paris Opera. Vishnevskaya was identified with two main roles: Tatiana in Eugene Onegin and Natascha in War and Peace , both of which she also took up. As a film actress, she was involved in, among others, Mikhail Shapiro's opera adaptation Katerina Ismailowa (1966) and Alexander Sokurow's drama Alexandra (2007), in each of which she played the title role. The latter film, which is about an old woman who travels to Chechnya to see her grandson stationed there again, competed in 2007 at the 60th Cannes Film Festival .

The French composer Marcel Landowski dedicated the opera Galina to her, based on her autobiography of the same name , which premiered in 1996 at the Opéra National de Lyon .

Conflict with the Soviet regime and expatriation

Galina Vishnevskaya was the victim of bad cultural and political decisions by the Soviet regime from an early age. In 1962, for example, she was not allowed to take part in the world premiere of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral , because the Soviet regime Britten's reconciliation concept of having three representatives of formerly warring nations perform together as vocal soloists did not suit the Soviet regime. According to Vishnevskaya's autobiography, the driving force behind the ban was the then Soviet Union and Republic Minister for National Education (Culture) Ekaterina Alexejewna Furzewa . In 1970, Galina Vishnevskaya's husband Mstislav Rostropovich took the Nobel Prize for Literature Alexander Solzhenitsyn , who had fallen out of favor with the Soviet regime, into his house and defended this in an open letter to the newspapers Izvestia , Pravda and Literaturnaya Gazeta . Rostropovich was therefore no longer allowed to leave the country from 1971 and received almost only engagements in the Soviet province. Galina Vishnevskaya was also harassed, as can be read in her autobiography. In 1974 a complete recording of the opera Tosca with the ensemble of the Bolshoi Theater remained unfinished because Rostropovich, who had taken over the direction of the orchestra, was forbidden by the authorities to continue conducting in the middle of the recording.

The incident marked the end of a series of serious conflicts with the regime: just one day after the Tosca admission was stopped, on March 29, 1974, Rostropovich applied for himself and his wife to leave for the West. A few weeks later, on July 29, 1974, the couple and their family left the Soviet Union, which revoked their citizenship four years later. In 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev , the then President of the Soviet Union, rehabilitated Rostropovich and his wife and offered them to become Soviet citizens again. Rostropovich later commented on this: "When Gorbachev made me an offer to apply for a Soviet passport in 1990, Galina and I wrote him a letter of thanks and refused." The last thirty years of his life were both stateless, but had been living again since February 1990 in Russia.

Appreciation

Together with Irina Konstantinovna Archipova , Vishnevskaya was considered the most important Soviet opera singer of her generation. Dmitri Shostakovich dedicated the soprano part of his 14th symphony and his seven romances based on the words of A. Blok to her , his friend Benjamin Britten the soprano part in his War Requiem , which they sang only nine months after the premiere in London and under the direction of the composer for was able to record the record because the Soviet regime had banned it from participating in the premiere in Coventry Cathedral .

Autobiography

  • Galina Vishnevskaya: Galina. Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1986, ISBN 3-7857-0433-X ; as paperback: Galina. Memories of a prima donna. Piper, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-492-28243-1 (translation from American into German by Christiane Müller based on the American edition of the Russian original Galina. Istorija zizni ).

literature

Web links

Commons : Galina Vishnevskaya  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Vishnevskaya: Galina. 1986, p. 354
  2. ↑ According to the autobiography Vishnevskaya Galina , p. 435 ff., The first act of the opera was recorded on March 28, 1974. Then a member of the cultural authority appeared and stopped the recording activity because it was supposedly "superfluous"
  3. ↑ officially for two years, which in the end became 14 years
personal data
SURNAME Vishnevskaya, Galina Pavlovna
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Вишневская, Галина Павловна (Russian spelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian opera singer (lyrical to dramatic soprano)
DATE OF BIRTH October 25, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Leningrad
DATE OF DEATH December 11, 2012
Place of death Moscow