Vale Galina Vishnevskaya – a link to history

The death was announced yesterday of Russian soprano Galina Vishnenskaya. She was 86. It is the end of an era. Married to the iconic cellist Msitislav Rostropovich from 1955 until his death in 2007, she was part of a circle of artists who included Britten, Shostakovich and Solzhenitsyn. Both Britten and Shostakovich wrote especially for her – the glorious soprano solo in Britten’s War Requiem and she  defined many of the roles in Russian opera vocal music, including Lisa in The Queen of Spades and Titania in Eugene Onegin. She remained a defiant dissident through the darkest times of the Soviet era.

Click here to read her obituary in The Guardian.

Click here for the obituary form the New York Times.