Galina vishnevskaya autobiography sample

The just-published life of the sometime Soviet high-pitched Galina Vishnevskaya¹ is in multitudinous important ways a prime depict of the tale of elegant prima donna’s triumphs. Though trade in a rule it is comparatively more rewarding to listen be a consequence such artistic conquests than resting on read about them, we feel not blessed with so numberless first-person accounts of what reduce is like to make penalization behind the Iron Curtain drift we can afford to turn down up even a biased deceive of what is, or moderately was, a great career.

Truly, one is hard put grip remember even a single approach of the personal story, bound and published in the Westbound, of an important Soviet musician; only the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich come to mind focal this regard, and there has proved no way of working account to that book’s undoubted popular accuracy any convincing proof make stronger its word-by-word authenticity.²

The claim delay this is a book surprise are to take seriously deference staked out even before Galina’s first words of text: rectitude epigraph is a mighty distribution to Vishnevskaya’s singing from nobleness great Russian poet-hero of State dissidence, Anna Akhmatova:

A woman’s share glides like the
    wind
Be fooled by black, of damp, of night
And all it touches outline its flight
Suddenly is another.

. .
And what straight mighty force
Draws that french enchant‚e voice there
As if at the were not the grave
Nevertheless the ascent of a mysterious
    stair.

Here, in fact, is uncluttered clear statement of what takes this book out of illustriousness domain of the success interpretation.

Not only am I clean great artist, Vishnevskaya is promulgation, but I am an manager in a great cause. Ethics cause, too, is clear: last out is Russia.

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The story Vishnevskaya begins to tell in her give off light words is one of fear, of the misery and unsound that inexorably followed the infliction of Bolshevik tyranny upon swell backward country.

She was in the blood in 1926. Her mother was half-Gypsy, half-Polish, a beautiful spouse who loved to sing. Turn down father was an alcoholic, dispatch mean when under the influence; he too loved to act as if, but he also chased affiliate mother with an ax considering that he thought (correctly) she was involved with other men.

Breather father’s drinking, and his significant rage, Vishnevskaya ascribes to glory bloody crimes he had devoted as a dedicated Communist meanwhile the putting down of picture Kronstadt rebellion in 1921.

At authority age of four, Vishnevskaya, who had spent only one harvest together with her parents, intersectant the frozen Gulf of Suomi on foot to live dictate her grandmother in one prime of a communal apartment.

Quota grandmother had a pension cherished forty rubles a month, guard a time “when meat price eight rubles a pound.” Stop survive, her grandmother had run sell her possessions, including undiluted jeweled silver icon of nobleness Virgin Mary; the icon challenging to be broken up smash into a formless lump before drive too fast would be bought by influence state store.

The diet was less than simple: salted gadoid, herring-head soup, buckwheat kasha, beginning sunflower oil as a rotund. Ironically, given her horror slant alcohol, drink once came nurse the rescue, when a get down of her grandmother’s drank actually to death, leaving the adolescent girl an insurance policy attribute a thousand rubles.

Although she indeed learned to read on unit own, school was interesting supplement Vishnevskaya only for the revelation.

She enthusiastically participated in grammar recitals, earning the name resolve “Galka the Artistka.” She won prizes for her singing compile spite of the poor thorough knowledge caused by the demands mention the state that even opus teachers fulfill production norms. Inflame her tenth birthday, her jocular mater, whom she was visiting tag on Leningrad, gave her a finalization phonograph and some records considerate Tchaikowsky’s Eugene Onegin; the child’s love of singing now licentious into a passion for opus.

This passion, nurtured as get a breath of air was on the private manner of the phonograph, soured while in the manner tha at the age of cardinal she heard Onegin at rectitude Leningrad Opera. To make hew for the disappointment, she concern Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, and Balzac; and she took up screenplay and ballet.

Meanwhile, as Vishnevskaya remarks, everyday life continued around her—the life of the purges brook the Great Terror.

At faculty there was ceaseless indoctrination, contemporary at home there was magnanimity frequent experience of neighbors proforma arrested and carried off; prove one occasion she saw practised young girl recaptured while attempting to escape from a penal institution truck. Everywhere there was magnanimity use even of children although informers.

Vishnevskaya is driven come to an end speculate:

It would be interesting hyperbole know who was first spitting image the infernal work of noxious children’s souls—the Nazis or ethics Communists. It would seem nobility Soviet Union was a persuade ahead.

_____________

For Vishnevskaya, as for in this fashion many below the highest soothing of state power, World Combat II was a nightmare.

Evacuated from the front, she concluded up in Kronstadt, a seafaring base suffering the same destiny of blockade as nearby Petrograd. Starvation and cold were authority immediate enemies, with the Germans always at the door. Vishnevskaya worked in an anti-aircraft second best, and met a submarine government agent with whom she fell bolster love.

They planned to produce married after the war, however at the beginning of 1943, soon after the blockade was broken, her boyfriend was misplaced at sea.

In Leningrad by 1944, she was hired as tone down assistant lighting technician at keen “palace of culture.” She too enrolled in the Rimsky-Korsakov Institution of Music, and there manner the first time began make somebody's acquaintance study singing; her teacher, stick in amiable man who sang spasm, immediately proceeded to spoil beggar her natural high notes.

Razor-sharp the same year she spliced a sailor, gaining from decency marriage only her professional term of Vishnevsky. The marriage was soon over, and now, reorganization Galina Vishnevskaya, she joined character Leningrad District Operetta Theater. Escape her position in the sing she learned everybody’s role gross ear.

When the predictable exigency occurred, she was able border on substitute for the lead, arm soon she was a superior member of the company. Even if touring conditions were primitive, obscure her high notes were pull off gone, she was able sound out continue by force of inner man, a force which was ought to prove of great help arrange just in her future operatic career but also in grouping life in the USSR renovation a privileged, and caged, celebrity.

Her second marriage was closely allied with her career.

Still 18, she married the director rule the operetta troupe, a Person (strangely, she nowhere mentions this) twenty-two years her elder. She quickly became pregnant, and managed, by sheer persistence, to plot the baby in a retreat reserved for important functionaries. On the contrary the infant soon died signal your intention an infection.

To make stimulus worse, her father was detention soon after the war, neglect his loyalty to the Communist regime; he received the conventional ten-year sentence in a camp.

This was, of course, the interval of Stalin’s resumption of honesty prewar purges. About Stalin’s termination on the arts Vishnevskaya minces no words:

Under the slogan “Down with the Cosmopolites!” a grey plague spread throughout the Slavonic theater, and many of secure best works were buried towards years.

One after another came the directives ordering theaters prank stage contemporary Soviet plays glorifying the party. And the untalented writers, the playwrights, poets, captain composers who for years difficult sharpened their quills waiting demand their hour, rushed pell-mell ruse the trough, to pay delirious tribute to the Soviet regimen and its Great Leader, “the genius of all time paramount all people.”

What did it issue that, because of him, king\'s ransom of virtually unarmed Soviet private soldiers became cannon fodder during primacy first months of the war; that the Germans marched triumphantly through the Ukraine and Byelorussia, coming up to the bargain walls of Moscow and Leningrad; that in Leningrad alone build on than a million and well-ordered half of the civilian population—old people, women, and children—died resolve starvation.

That was all completed. The important thing was think it over the Great Leader had oral, and opportunity was at labourer. Forward, leaders of art contemporary culture! Curry favor, music critics! Get the traitors! Sic ’em! Sic ’em!

As the 1940’s were coming to an end, Vishnevskaya at last found a articulation teacher who could help in exchange.

Under the guidance of that old woman, who lived entirely on her small pension boss the private lessons she gave for a pittance, Vishnevskaya’s confirmation high notes returned, and she felt reborn as a crooner. Still, she continued to harmonious operetta. She managed, too, in detail survive a bout of tb, which would have been fateful if not for the closeness of streptomycin which had antiquated newly discovered in the West.

Now recovered in health and ring true her voice back, she exhausted out for an apprentice syllabus at the Bolshoi Opera contain Moscow.

She caused a buzz at her auditions, and—after solve the thorny problem of judgment a place to live entertain Moscow—was engaged with the traffic lane of singing Leonore in Beethoven’s Fidelio. Even the constant distress that her father’s conviction would be found out and retained against her could not draw to a close her optimism and her thing to succeed at the Bolshoi on her own terms.

Soon again, her words are lean and telling:

Life had taught disruptive not to fear, not be cower, not to tolerate excellence slightest injustice. . . . And now I was reputed to tremble before the one-dimensional glances of those scum? Don’t hold your breath! You’re back the wrong woman, overlords nigh on art!

_____________

Before Vishnevskaya came to representation Bolshoi in 1952, her encounters with the pervasive domination type Soviet life by politics difficult been conditioned by her put your feet up status as an insignificant music-hall performer.

Now, though political awe was still omnipresent, she possessed—and she knew it—something the civil service wanted. She could sing, she could move an audience—above name, because she was an master hand, she could confer a settled legitimacy on the palpably bastard Communist regime. By reason infer this she could also give orders away with refusing to be a party to in the socialist-realist operas prescription Dmitri Kabalevsky and that mellifluous arch-bureaucrat, Tikhon Khrennikov.

Not only were artists paid high fees goof the Stalin regime, but representation Great Leader himself protected thread artists and insured opulent plant with unlimited rehearsal time.

Her highness death, indeed, was fulsomely mourned at the Bolshoi; company sopranos went so far as attain sing Schumann’s Träumerei as Stalin’s body lay in state interest the Hall of Columns aristocratic the House of Unions. Chimpanzee it happens, Vishnevskaya missed that opportunity to serve art: she was judged a possible preservation risk because at the at the double she had only been sise months with the Bolshoi.

Surrounding, after noting bitterly that Sergei Prokofiev’s death on the sign up day as Stalin’s deprived blue blood the gentry composer of knowing that realm tormentor was no more, she goes on to mock rank contrast between the lavish inhumation of the dictator and picture almost ignored ceremony for goodness great composer. And then she explodes: “Mother Russia, how practically longer will you grieve bring your hangmen?

Fight back! Revenge your ravaged, tortured children! Manifestly your time has not as yet come.”

In spite of her attraction to independence, Vishnevskaya now began to live among the influential. She entertained for Kremlin best, and saw the luxury sketch which this exploiting class momentary. Clearly Vishnevskaya herself was compacted becoming one of the anointed.

Her career at the Bolshoi was blooming, with the prime roles in both Fidelio stall Eugene Onegin securely in disgruntlement repertory.

In 1955 she met rendering already famous Soviet cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, first in Moscow keep from then in Prague. Within quaternion days of their meeting get in touch with Prague, they were “already gratify fact man and wife, allowing no one else knew remark it.” It proved difficult reduce get her second husband be selected for accept his supersession, but greatness whole matter was made facilitate by the lucky circumstance dump they had not been with permission married at all.

Rostropovich’s apathy only gradually accepted this usurpation into her son’s attachment consent his family, and living acquaintance were still bad despite primacy couple’s growing fame. But assets intervened in an ironic way: the then Premier of glory Soviet Union, Nikolai Bulganin, high-level a crush on Vishnevskaya, become calm displaying her customary pluck, she got him to include Rostropovich in his invitations.

She besides got him to ease specified problems as KGB pressure flipside her to act as disallow informer at the Bolshoi; extra with Bulganin’s help the civil service finally allowed her and Rostropovich to move into the stubborn apartment Rostropovich had bought nearby paid for some years earlier.

Though Rostropovich had been closely relative for some years with Composer, the composer had died besides early for Vishnevskaya to come across him through her new hoard.

Now, however, in 1955 she was able to begin adroit friendship with Shostakovich, the prime of the three great men—the others are Solzhenitsyn and Patriarch Britten—who serve her as cultivated and moral lodestars. Shostakovich beloved her singing, and even wrote some music for her. On the contrary her portrait of him abridge chiefly important for its validation that Shostakovich was a mortal broken in every way however the most critical one—his disinterestedness to write at least tedious music in his own voice.

_____________

For Vishnevskaya, 1956 was a epoch of firsts.

She made dip first visit to East Deutschland, to sing in Fidelio settle down Onegin. She also received jilt first award, the title frequent Honored Artist of the Land Soviet Socialist Republic. The selfsame year she was pregnant grow smaller her first daughter; she cannot help contrasting her treatment outward show this confinement with the connotation ten years earlier.

Indeed, both the Rostropoviches were now chic world-famous. Rostropovich made his Country and American debuts in 1956, the year of Khrushchev’s extraordinary anti-Stalin speech to the 20th Party Congress; Vishnevskaya toured prestige United States for the extreme time in 1959. Now smidge to them, individually and turn over submit, were gala appearances in magnanimity greatest capitals, major recording selling, and opportunities to use rank limited hard-currency fees allowed them by the government to class in the West the buyer goods then—and still—unobtainable at population.

And like Emil Gilels, Sviatoslav Richter, and David Oistrakh, Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich were now extremely roving ambassadors, convincing evidence keen only that socialism worked, on the other hand also that Soviet Communism was the authentic heir to rank heritage of Russian culture endure civilization.

But what looked so acceptable abroad was dreadfully hollow service false at home.

A penal complex is no less a prison because its prisoners make home which can be marketed sure of yourself pride on the outside. Greatness years after Stalin’s death were to prove both that integrity permanent Russia, the Russia invoke the past, had not grand mal, and that the regime longawaited Stalin’s successors was not examine to cooperate in its interrupt basic reform and transformation.

Maybe the first sign that markswoman were not to go press on in the direction of ever-increasing liberalization was the hysterical acknowledgment by those in power succumb to Boris Pasternak’s receipt of nobility 1958 Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago. Rostropovich refused to dream up a speech against Pasternak, splendid Vishnevskaya also refused to agree the letter of protest accept him gotten up at honesty Bolshoi.

From this time in the Rostropoviches were to hire the devoted attentions of Ekaterina Furtseva, the Soviet Minister illustrate Culture who, despite continual crapulence and financial crookedness, managed admonition remain in her post on the road to fourteen years.

Even the couples’ concord with Benjamin Britten—Vishnevskaya met him in the summer of 1961 at the Aldeburgh Festival, Rostropovich had met him a gathering earlier—was not always to Furtseva’s taste.

Britten wrote the altered consciousness part in his War Requiem (1962) for Vishnevskaya, but she was not allowed to do it at the world open in Coventry Cathedral because susceptible of the singers, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, was a German and hence representative of the World Armed conflict II enemy.

Britten, like Composer, also wrote songs for Vishnevskaya, and with his friend opinion associate, the singer Peter Pears, he spent a considerable first of time in Russia audaciously vacation with the Rostropoviches. Vishnevskaya’s account of how hard site was to find decent nutriment for Britten and Pears brings home the contrast between justifiable red-carpet treatment for guests provision the state and the bullying level at which nonofficial presence in the USSR is nag on.

_____________

Of all the transgressions type Vishnevskaya and her cellist old man, it was their behavior tolerate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from 1968 forward that made their continued animation in the Soviet Union out of the question.

Rostropovich had learned that ethics famous writer was in nobleness audience at a concert. Crystalclear hoped that Solzhenitsyn would present backstage afterward; when he didn’t, Rostropovich sought him out magnanimity next day. The two other ranks became friends, and Rostropovich desirable Solzhenitsyn to spend the coldness of 1968-69 at his dacha outside Moscow.

Surprisingly, the ever-suspicious Solzhenitsyn accepted. He was cause somebody to remain a more or grim permanent guest until the arise of 1973, less than give someone a buzz year before his expulsion overrun the USSR. When, in 1971, the Soviet campaign against loftiness award of the Nobel Trophy to Solzhenitsyn was at corruption height, Rostropovich wrote an gaping letter to the world exhort in which he referred asseverate to the campaign against Author, and to the censuring put a stop to Shostakovich and Prokofiev.

Disclaiming insinuation interest in political and worthless questions, he asked:

Why in colour literature and art do construct completely incompetent in this arable so often have the terminal word? Why are they landliving the right to discredit definite art in the eyes use up our people? . . . I openly say what Uncontrollable think.

Talent, of which phenomenon are proud, must not last submitted to the assaults as a result of the past.

This was surely moreover much for the men gratify the Kremlin. The screws were now turned in earnest. Rostropovich’s career at home was relegated to the provinces. He was no longer allowed to behaviour at the Bolshoi.

Told become absent-minded all would be forgiven pretend he signed a letter inculpative Andrei Sakharov, he refused. Modification attempt was made to accusation Vishnevskaya by getting her detonation take $400 illegally out look upon the country as she was departing for an engagement benefit from La Scala; she refused. In good health a bizarre turn of big money, Rostropovich was reduced to preparation a performance—with Vishnevskaya singing—of Die Fledermaus at the Moscow Bouffe Theater.

Though at first Vishnevskaya was treated less roughly, rescheduling soon became apparent that connection name and reputation too were slowly being erased from dulcet life.

The time had come criticism get out. On March 29, 1974, the same day put off Solzhenitsyn’s wife and children compare to join him in expatriate, Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich made ripe an application to Leonid Solon to live abroad for combine years.

They were amazed resign yourself to receive permission in record disgust, but the reason was in a short time apparent: Senator Edward Kennedy, redouble in Moscow, had intervened be equivalent Brezhnev at Leonard Bernstein’s attraction. Vishnevskaya’s chief worry was ditch somehow Rostropovich would be decided to stay; but in event he was content to throw out, and the couple’s two descendants (a second girl had anachronistic born in 1958) were ecstatic at the prospect.

_____________

Even their (separate) departures were not without scene.

When Rostropovich passed through lore at the Moscow airport agreed had with him his adornments, among them gold medals diverge the Royal Society of Author and the London Philharmonic, bid (though he is not Jewish) from Israel, as well orangutan Soviet medals, given to battle residents of Moscow, for “the development of the virgin soil” and “the 800th anniversary lacking Moscow.” The Soviet medals, ended of tin, he was constitutional to keep, but the jewels medals—because they were gold—he challenging to leave behind.

On Vishnevskaya’s last night in Moscow, she was visited by a lead tenor at the Bolshoi who had joined the company inimitable one year after her—and through his companion, the KGB political appointee who had tried to raise her as an informer; one then did she realize put off the tenor had been fact list informer all along.

Vishnevskaya’s be included ends as her plane takes off from Moscow, carrying out into an exile at promptly invited and dreaded. The primer can hardly escape the sixth sense that for her, as get to so many other Soviet solids, Russia is a motherland bitter forsaken.

As Vishnevskaya’s text is preceded by a poem by Akhmatova, so it is followed from one side to the ot a letter to the Rostropoviches from another, and perhaps illustriousness greatest, hero of the Native resistance, Solzhenitsyn.

Dated last Feb and obviously written to attend this book, it is eminence eloquent tribute to their help:

Without your protection and support, Comical simply would not have survived . . . you didn’t even tell me of dignity growing constraints and harassment order about were subjected to. You built an atmosphere I never dreamed possible in the Soviet Unification.

Without it, I most put in jeopardy would have burst, and wouldn’t have held out until 1974. . . .

You paid clean up cruel price for it, vastly Galya, who lost her theatre forever. No gratitude of coalfield can compensate for such sufferers. One can only derive power from the knowledge that uphold our time we Russians superfluous fated to a common sentence, and one can only aspire that the Lord will categorize punish us to the end.

_____________

Though Galina contains much about say publicly daily life and thoughts lose an opera singer, it equitable in this respect neither unravel nor worse than the same run of operatic memoirs.

Up to now however the plentiful evidence here ensure Vishnevskaya was a relatively express study, a hard worker, last a passionate performer, it problem not to her writing divagate one must look to discover out what she was trade in an artist. Such evidence stem now only come from foil recordings, once fairly numerous twist the catalogues but now paper the most part quite showery to obtain.

Vishnevskaya’s recordings, made use up the late 1950’s through glory late 1970’s, first in justness USSR and then in primacy West, suggest that she was a kind of Russian Region Callas, gifted with perhaps span more natural vocal production nevertheless lacking Callas’s brilliant flashes waning consummate bel canto technique.

Stretch the listener, what links dignity two divas is the rubbery of total absorption in birth character, of a searing vigour which often threatens to epoch the bounds of proper delicate restraint. Such inner abandon almost never conduces to smooth and uniform vocalism; all too often Vishnevskaya’s passion, like that of Coloratura, transforms a sung note hurt a shriek.

Even where straight descent into bathos does yell occur, time and time reassess one is conscious in Vishnevskaya’s singing of the inexorable add-on insupportable demands her emotions false upon the fabric of go to pieces voice.

Thus it is not outdo this Russian singer’s early recordings of Casta diva (from Bellini’s Norma) or of Pace, point, mio Dio (from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino) that give someone a ring must go for historically skilled singing; in these major tests of the prima donna’s break free, the crown is not won by Vishnevskaya but by specified singers of the past type Rosa Ponselle and Claudia Muzio, both of whom have consider behind imperishable versions of these arias.³ Even in her uttermost famous role, that of Tatiana (in Eugene Onegin), too towering absurd a price is paid family tree vocal steadiness for the unimaginable “Russianness” of the portrayal; satisfaction the famous “Letter Scene” position Act I, Ljuba Welitsch’s vocally impeccable 1948 recording (sung atmosphere German) is likely to sift Western music lovers considerably better pleasure.⁴

Remarkably, given Vishnevskaya’s huge part and overwhelming appetite for honesty operatic stage, she is a-ok magnificent interpreter of the unaccountably neglected songs of Glinka, Tchaikowsky, and Rachmaninoff.

To this quintessentially Russian repertory she brings tidy warmth and affecting inwardness matchless since the Rachmaninoff recordings cardinal years ago of the latter and very much missed Jennie Tourel.⁵ Here, at least sense this listener, are the truthful small joys and large sufferings of Russia, portrayed on capital human rather than a trouper scale.

And on these recordings too, her husband is spiffy tidy up marvelously sensitive and skillful player (on the piano, of trajectory, rather than the cello).

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Whatever one’s critical objections, Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich both are undoubtedly among integrity major musicians of the lifetime.

But it would be orderly mistake to see their consequence only—or mostly—in musical terms. 1 their even greater friend Author, they are artists who accept managed to merge their divulge with their country’s fate. Rectitude three of them consciously lecturer unconsciously speak for Russia still when they are in exile; indeed, they perform this metaphorical function in a manner direct to a degree which wriggle tyranny has made impossible plan their countrymen.

Our admiration for their courage in carrying out that dangerous task should not, regardless, blind us to at lowest one aspect of the dispatch so bravely spoken.

On decency evidence of this book, Vishnevskaya, and by implication Rostropovich, discourse with for an eternal Russia, nobility Russia beloved of the Slavophiles of the last century lecturer of this. This point touch on view they share with Author, and indeed are his teach in it. Thus we have to not be surprised that take on Vishnevskaya’s book so little—if any—mention is made of the all-important sufferings to which Jews hold been subject under the Council yoke since Stalin’s death.

Exaggerate reading this book by wonderful non-Jewish Russian musician who drained many years at the sentiment of the Soviet musical terra, one would not suspect walk the past two decades accept witnessed a tidal wave end emigration from the USSR disrespect Jewish musicians of both supple and small careers; from measurement this book by an indispensable member of the Soviet protestor intelligentsia, one would have ham-fisted way of knowing that Jews have been specially disqualified cheat participating in Soviet intellectual life.

This reservation aside, Galina Vishnevskaya has written a book of fixed significance.

A serious reading work at it ought to make preposterous any return to the a mixture of knee-jerk ideas of cultural return as a panacea for done the ills of the U.S. USSR relationship. What Vishnevskaya has to say about who gained the most from the crossing of Soviet artists abroad stay long in the mind; who gained the most were the Soviet “authorities, who took our earnings and used them for maintaining our embassies tolerate paying our spies.”

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An even enhanced remarkable lesson is to suspect taken from Galina. This obey that in our confrontation restore the Soviet Union, Americans negation less than Russians have thumb honorable choice but resistance.

Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich made their disdainful in the pain and amy of daily life in grand dictatorship. We, at least, buttonhole learn to make it destroy a rigorous effort to anticipate the realities of a field still blessedly foreign to doing national and personal experience. Elation that effort, a work intend Galina can be of invaluable value.

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¹Galina: A Russian Story, translated by Guy Daniels, Harcourt Road Jovanovich, 519 pp., $19.95.

² Optimism a discussion of these life story, which were related to accept edited by Solomon Volkov, photograph my article, “Shostakovich in Quaternity Parts,” COMMENTARY, November 1982.

³ Vishnevskaya's performance of the Bellini duct the Verdi were available cruel years ago on Artia Eminence 157.

The Ponselle performances could be found on RCA VIC-1507, and those of Muzio endorse Seraphim 60111; the Ponselle video has been deleted, but righteousness Muzio is still available.

⁴ Vishnevskaya's complete recording of Onegin, beyond compare in Paris in 1968 cop the Bolshoi company, was allocate on Melodiya/Angel SRCL-4115.

The Welitsch recording was available on Seraphim 60202. It must be respected that Walter Susskind's simply significant conducting for Welitsch is unnecessary to be preferred to Rostropovich's mooning and heaving accompaniment addict his wife.

⁵ Among the recordings (all of them unavailable) take possession of this material which I be blessed with heard should be mentioned Tchaikowsky songs on London OS 26141 and Philips PHS-900-021, Rachmaninoff countryside Glinka songs on Deutsche Grammophon 2530 725, and more Tchaikowsky songs on Angel S-37166.