By Olga Fyodorova
…The Lisitsians’ spacious Moscow apartment was full
of people all speaking at the same time. Small wonder since the landlady
once was a gymnastics coach, all of her four children were artists and
almost all her grandchildren were musicians. To say nothing about the head
of the family –Pavel Lisitsian, whose unforgettable baritone graced the
Bolshoi Opera for three decades and enjoyed almost daily airplay all around
the country.
Pavel Lisitsian road to stardom was long and winding.
The son of a drilling engineer, he also inherited his father’s musicality
and the two regularly sang together in an Armenian church choir in Vladikavkaz.
Coming to Leningrad at the age of 20, Pavel started
working at the Baltiisky shipyard simultaneously attending evening
classes at the local conservatory his bubbling energy enabling him to keep
up with his hectic schedule.
Graduating from the conservatory, Pavel, like many other
budding singers, signed with Leningrad’s experimentalist Maly Opera Theater.
After a brief stint there, he moved on to join an opera company in the
Armenian capital Yerevan and, in 1940, he was admitted, outsinging
many other contestants, to the venerable Bolshoi Opera.
Less than a year after, on June 22, 1941, the German
troops crossed the Soviet border at the start of four long years of bloody
battles and untold suffering…
Pavel Lisitsian immediately volunteered to join a team
of musicians performing at the frontlines and in military hospitals in
Moscow.
“We gave 72 concerts in just 26 days performing 3 or
4 times a day, sometimes right under the enemy fire,” he later recalled.
Playing a total of about 500 concerts during the war,
Pavel Lisitsian was decorated and awarded with an inscribed handgun.
“During the war I sang many Russian, Armenian and Georgian
folk songs, Pavel says. There were people of many nationalities fighting
at the frontlines and they really enjoyed them…”
After the war there was no stopping Lisitsian’s fast
growing fame which saw him singing every single premiere the Bolshoi had,
including one of his all-time bests – the part of Germon in Giuseppe
Verdi’s opera La Traviata …
His amazingly beautiful velvety timbre perfectly fit
Germon’s melodious, expressive and flexible part. Belcanto translates from
the Italian as “beautiful singing” and Lisitsian’s performance gave full
credit to that description…
His other best was the part of Valentine in Gounod’s
opera Faust, a warrior and a loving brother sacrificing his life for his
sister’s honor. Pavel Lisitsian added some very anxious lyricism to his
character’s heroic nature, his voice so warm and beautiful…
Unlike many of his colleagues, Pavel Lisitsian was lucky
to break free from behind Stalin’s Iron Curtain that separated Russia from
the rest of the world. Performing first in the Communist-ruled Eastern
Europe, he later became one of the first Soviet singers to perform at the
Metropolitan Opera in New York. Unfortunately, those forays were too rare
and far in between to make him a world celebrity. Shortly after,
the Cold War set in cutting short what was already a mere trickle of Russian
musicians performing abroad.
Back home, however, Pavel Lisitsian remained for many
decades as one of this country’s best-loved operatic baritones…
On January 14, 1966 Pavel Lisitsian walked out for the
last time onto the stage of the Bolshoi Theater singing the part of King
Amonsaro in Aida by Giuseppe Verdi. At 55 he was at the very height
of his popularity but he still decided to call it quits to make way for
the young new talents eager to take center stage…
There was nothing ambitious in that decision. Pavel
simply wanted to try his hand in concert singing crisscrossing the country
easily moving from one time zone to another…
By then his chamber repertoire had grown expanded immensely
now including Bach, Schumann, Schubert and love songs written by Russian
composers, above all by Pyotr Tchaikovsky. “I love Tchaikovsky so much,”
he once admitted. “His music is so melodic, at once complicated and simple.
And very human and warm…”
Pavel Lisitsian was a great teacher too, with students
both in Russia and in Germany and master-classes held for many years in
Weimar.
“I want my students to be more than just good singers,
he said. I want them to be educated, intelligent and capable of fulfilling
their ideas on stage. Opera singing is too complicated a profession
to be taken lightly…”
In November Pavel Lisitsian will mark his 90th birthday.
Even though he stopped singing a long time ago, his exceptionally beautiful
voice is available on many records inspiring a new generation of opera
singers…
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