Stanisława Zawadzka

Stanisława Agata Zawadzka ( Stani Zawa (d) ska ; born February 5, 1890 in Warsaw , † July 21, 1988 in Skolimów ) was a Polish opera singer ( soprano ) and vocal teacher.

Zawadska attended the Emilia Szteinbokówna Institute in Warsaw and then began studying medicine in Saint Petersburg. From 1910 she took singing lessons there. In 1916 she completed her studies as a doctor. In 1918 she made her debut (presumably in Russia) as a singer in the opera Cavalleria rusticana . As a military doctor, she took part in the Russian civil war against the Bolsheviks under General Lucjan Żeligowski before she returned to Warsaw in 1919.

There she received an engagement at the National Opera in 1920 , but at the same time also worked in the bacteriological laboratory of the Ujazdowski Hospital . In 1921 she went to Italy, where she studied with the teachers Emilia Corsi and Luisa Cortesi took the theater school of Teresa Boetti-Valvasoura visited and as a singer in La Spezia and Palermo led among others by Franco Capuana , who later became director of the Opera Theater of Rome and performed by Antonio Guarnieri . In 1923 she sang Aida twice in Warsaw under the direction of Emil Młynarski .

In the same year numerous other appearances followed in Italy (including in Ferrara, Venice, at the Teatro La Fenice , in Bologna). After guest appearances in Cairo and Alexandria, she made guest appearances in the Netherlands and Spain and was considered a star of the Italian opera scene in the late 1920s. In 1927 she appeared in the amphitheater in Verona with a capacity of 25,000 and sang the soprano part in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony under the direction of Antonio Guarnieri .

In 1929 she was accepted into the ensemble of La Scala in Milan . She performed there alongside Jan Kiepura and sang Alicia in Verdi's Falstaff with the ensemble at the Covent Garden Opera . In the 1930s, her repertoire comprised around thirty of the most important operas from Italy, France, Russia and Germany, plus sixteen operas by Polish composers.

After having had her main residence in Milan since then, she went to Poznan in 1935 and became a soloist at the Teatr Wielki under Zygmunt Latoszewski . Here she took part in the performance of Ludomir Różycki's opera Beatrix Cenci and the Polish premiere of Francesco Cilea's opera Adriana Lecouvreur and sang Elsa in Richard Wagner's Lohengrin (1936), Sélika in Giacomo Meyerbeer's Die Afrikanerin (1937) and the title roles in La Gioconda (1938) and Turandot (1939). In Warsaw in 1935 she performed as Aida at the Teatr Wielki under the direction of Jascha Horsenstein and gave concerts with the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Grzegorz Fitelberg in 1936 and 1938 .

During the occupation, Zawadzka did not perform and taught singing in Warsaw. She gave her first concert with opera arias in June 1945. Until 1948 she was a soloist at the Poznan Opera. From 1945 to 1950 she led a singing class at the Cracow Academy of Music, after which she taught again in Warsaw. Her students included the sisters Stefania and Halina Woytowicz , Ada Lenczewska , Maria Taszowska , Janina Lipkowska , Anna Vranowa and Alicja Okońska . In 1960, General Aleksander Zawadzki, as Chairman of the State Council of the People's Republic of Poland , bestowed the Officer's Cross, and in 1981 the State Council Chairman Henryk Jabłoński the Commander's Cross of the Polonia Restituta Order .

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• maestro.net - Stanisława Zawadzka
• operasingers.it - ​​Stanisława Zawadzka