Boris Christoff

Boris Christoff was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in May 1914, the son of a music teacher. He sang in the church choir of the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia and worked as a magistrate before being granted a state scholarship to study singing in Italy in 1942. He studied with Riccardo Stracciari in Rome, made his début at La Fenice in Venice in 1946, and his Covent Garden début followed in 1949 as Boris in Mussorgsky’s *Boris Godunov* — the role for which he became internationally identified.

His central repertoire was the Russian and Italian bass roles of the international operatic stage. The title role in *Boris Godunov*, Khovansky in *Khovanshchina*, Ivan Susanin in Glinka’s *A Life for the Tsar*, King Philip in Verdi’s *Don Carlo*, the title role in Boito’s *Mefistofele*, and Verdi’s Procida and Fiesco. He sang regularly at Covent Garden, the Salzburg Festival, the Vienna State Opera, La Scala and the Bayreuth Festival, but was famously denied a US visa for Cold War reasons in 1950 and never sang at the Metropolitan Opera. His EMI recordings of the Mussorgsky operas, made through the 1950s and 1960s, remained reference performances long after his retirement.

Christoff died in Rome in June 1993. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his Russian operatic work.