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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nadezhda Andreyevna Obukhova (1886 - 1961) was a Russian mezzo-soprano.
She was awarded the title People’s Artist of the USSR in 1937.
Pianist Heinrich Neuhaus said that "he who even once hears her voice,
will never forget it...".
Childhood
Obukhova came from an artistic family. Two of her uncles were
professional singers, one of whom was the opera director of the Bolshoi
Theatre. Her grandfather Adrian Mazaraki was a noted pianist, and her
great-grandfather Yevgeny Baratynsky was a poet of Pushkin circle.
Her family had some wealth, and would often spend summers in Nice,
France, where Obukhova received her first singing lessons from Eleanora
Lipman. In 1907, she was enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory, where she
was instructed by Umberto Masetti.
Career
After her graduation, she found work singing in various concerts around
Russia, but she did not make her operatic debut until 1916. Her operatic
debut was in the role of Pauline in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades at
the Bolshoi. She quickly became a popular singer, appearing in a number
of other productions including Carmen, Dalila, The Tsar’s Bride (as
Marfa and as Lyubasha), The Snow Maiden, Der Ring des Nibelungen (as
Fricka), Marina, Love for Three Oranges and Sadko.
She was a performer in the first radio concert in the Soviet Union,
which took place in 1922. She sang Pauline’s aria from The Queen of
Spades. She gave other radio concerts, including the first broadcast
from the Bolshoi Theatre, a production of The Tsar’s Bride with Antonina
Nezhdanova, Leonid Speransky and Vasily Petrov. Increasingly through the
1920s and 1930s, she began to incorporate popular songs into her concert
repertoire. In 1937 she made her first studio recording, of pieces from
The Queen of Spades.
Obukhova retired in 1943. After her retirement, she continued to give
occasional concerts and radio performances. She died in the Crimea in
August 1961, two months after giving her last concert.
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