By Olga Fyodorova
Yelena Obraztsova was the best loved Soviet opera singer of the 1970s and
80s with the newspaper France Soir writing “If you hear her once, you will
be hooked for life…”
Yelena Obraztsova started dreaming about a stage career early on. Her parents
wanted her to flesh out the high hopes she inspired in physics and mathematics
but her love for the arts ultimately prevailed. After finishing high school,
Yelena entered the Leningrad Conservatory and, as a third year student
there, won a national singers competition in 1962.
That win was only the beginning of a long and very successful career. The
following year the young singer made her debut at the Bolshoi Theater,
in 1964 she made her first foreign tour and in 1965 she gave her first
solo concert. In 1970 she triumphed performing at two prestigious
international contests – the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the
Francisco Vinas Contest in Barcelona. Five years later Obraztsova was named
the best performer of Carmen in Georges Bizet’s opera of the same name.
She spent six long years preparing what every mezzo-soprano everywhere
dreams of singing, not daring to sing it in public…
“Right now I can’t sing it the way I want to,” she said, but when she finally
did, it was a different Carmen, one people had never seen before…
“Obraztsova’s Carmen epitomizes the mysteries of the ever-changing woman’s
heart, which lights up as fast as it fizzles out,” eulogized a critic in
the magazine Music Life.
“There is not a speck of cruelty or vulgarity in her,” said the Austrian
newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung. “She is all about femininity…”
“Beautiful and seductive, this Carmen infatuated Jose and just about everybody!”
raved a newspaper in Marseilles.
Yelena Obraztsova stunned the world with her workaholic attitude preparing
a new part in just a few short weeks, spending hours on end listening to
other singers’ recordings and her own versions on trains and planes, at
home and in hotel rooms, her math-friendly brains and phenomenal memory
producing unbelievable results. Opera producers and conductors scrambled
to sign her up knowing how quick and reliable she was.
Artistic directors were equally happy to team up with someone whose strong
talent for expressing the dramatic scene and red-hot sent people on their
feet and crying bravo! after the very first few notes she sang… The great
stage and film director Franco Dzefirelli admired Obraztsova and engaged
her in some of his plays and musicals.
Widely hailed as the ultimate Verdian singer, Yelena Obraztsova was invited
to sing Eboli in La Scala’s 1978 production of Don Carlos timed for the
theater’s bicentennial anniversary and broadcast by the world’s leading
television networks.
She was equally larger-than-life singing in French operas as the absolutely
inimitable Dalilah in Saint-Saens’ Samson and Dalilah and Charlotte in
Werther by Jules Massenet.
“I have sung Charlotte with the best conductors around, including Georges
Praitre,” she recalls. “I’ve sung with Jose Carreras, Placido Domingo and
Alfredo Kraus. The latter inspired in me so much love for Werther that
once, after the show, I wrote a letter to Charlotte pledging to bring back
her lost love…”
In 1986 Yelena Obraztsova decided to try her hand as a producer staging
Werther at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow.
“I don’t feel myself a novice here at all,” she said. “Maybe that’s
because of my eleven years of teaching at the Moscow Conservatory. Each
day I keep telling my students about the way an artist feels deep inside,
about the subtle undertones and the underlying idea of their characters
they should get across to the listeners. As to handling the mise en scenes,
that’s no problem at all, really…”
Obraztsova invited a bunch of young singers and the seasoned conductor
Algis Zhuraitis whom she later married…
Opera divas are rarely serious about chamber music, but not Yelena Obraztsova
who has always been very impartial to songs by Schumann, Schubert, Tchaikovsky
and Rachmaninoff…
She unveiled many pieces of modern-day chamber music, always going for
Georgy Sviridov’s music whose songs, so unmistakably Russian in spirit,
had something very special about them. Each time she sang his songs, Georgy
Sviridov was there, accompanying her on stage…
Her concerts with the Russian Folk Orchestra were hugely successful. Her
performances of the old Russian love songs were fiery and inspiring revealing
that inbred Russianness which looked as if it came from the mid-19th century.
Yelena Obraztsova tried her hand in all existing vocal genres, including
operetta. Passionate and hard-driven, she was not reaching out for soprano
parts but before very long she realized all too well how treacherous the
human voice can be. When her voice started cracking up high with the lower
notes sounding unnaturally shriek she realized that her brilliant career
of the world’s premier operatic mezzo-soprano was all but over... She keeps
on singing but different parts and without the deafening success she once
enjoyed…
Adding to her misfortunes, her husband suddenly died and, shortly after,
her apartment was burglarized but, unfazed by all that, Obraztsova devoted
herself wholly to teaching. Including her own daughter but realizing how
hard it is to teach a loved one, she enlisted the help of Montserrat Caballe,
no less.
Obraztsova recently organized a young singers contest of her own name.
Presiding over a star-studded international jury, she awarded the very
best but, unfortunately, none of them was nearly as good as she once was…
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