Galina Vishnevskaya

Galina Vishnevskaya was born in Leningrad in October 1926, the daughter of a sailor and a singer; she survived the Siege of Leningrad as a teenager. She studied with Vera Garina from 1944 and worked through her early twenties as a singer of operetta and concert repertoire in regional Russian and Estonian houses. She auditioned for the Bolshoi Theatre in 1952 and was admitted immediately as a principal soprano — the company in which she remained as the leading lyric and dramatic Russian soprano of her generation for over twenty years.

Her central repertoire was the Russian operatic soprano roles — Tatiana in *Eugene Onegin*, Liza in *The Queen of Spades*, Natasha in *War and Peace*, Marfa in *The Tsar’s Bride*, Aida, Cio-Cio-San, Tosca, the title roles in *Madama Butterfly* and *La traviata*, and Katerina in Shostakovich’s *Katerina Izmailova*. Britten composed the soprano solo of the *War Requiem* with her in mind for the 1962 Coventry consecration performance; she was eventually replaced by Heather Harper for the première itself by the Soviet authorities, but recorded the role under Britten’s direction in 1963. She married the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in 1955; the couple defended Solzhenitsyn publicly in 1974 and were stripped of Soviet citizenship in 1978. Their citizenship was restored in 1990.

Vishnevskaya founded the Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Centre in Moscow in 2002. She died in Moscow in December 2012. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of her Russian operatic and Britten work.