Galina Vishnevskaya

Vishnevskaya was loved both for being an emotional singer and a gifted actress; she breathed new life into roles such as Tatyana in Evgeny Onegin (her signature role) and Nastasha Rostova in War and Peace. During this period, she was rarely allowed to perform in the West, but when she did, it was always to rave reviews.

In 1955 Vishnevskaya married Mstislav Rostropovich (according to the legend, they had known each other for just five days; it was her third marriage) and from that day forward their personal and creative lives were bound one to another. The couple became friends with Dmitry Shostakovich, who wrote a vocal cycle based on the poems of Sasha Chyorny and Alexander Blok with them in mind. Benjamin Britten wrote the soprano role in his War Requiem for her.

The couple performed and recorded together countless times over their half-century together. Among their greatest works were their recordings of Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death, Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14, Prokofiev's War and Peace, and romances by Glinka and Rakhmaninov.

Yet fame also had a dark side in the Soviet Union, as Vishnevskaya recounted in her memoirs (Galina: A Russian Story). Among other things, she was often required to sing at drunken parties for members of the Politburo (many of whom continually made passes at her). "In that huge pigsty you sing for their pleasure like a serf girl," she wrote.

Beginning in 1970, because of the couple's close friendship with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (and their own dissident activity, evoked by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia), their concerts began being canceled, and they stopped being mentioned in Soviet media. In 1974, they left the USSR and in 1978 they were stripped of their Soviet citizenship. It was not restored until 1990, when they were allowed to return.

In 2002 Vishnevskaya opened a Center for Opera Singing in Moscow, whose goal was to preserve Russian opera traditions and to educate talented young singers. It is a world-class center and, as a rule, focuses on "traditional" opera productions and performance.

This should not be surprising, as Vishnevskaya herself was always critical to modern opera (although in her youth she criticized then standard opera interpretations as stodgy and boring). In fact, in 2006, she had the location for her 80th birthday celebration moved from the Bolshoi Theater to the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall after being upset by the premiere of Dmitry Chernyakov's slightly avant garde presentation of Evgeny Onegin. "I was so upset by the premier in the Bolshoi," she said, "that I still have not gotten over it! It was a complete distortion! Larina drinks vodka in the first scene, laughing inappropriately... There are cretins everywhere, but opera is not written about them, and Pushkin did not write about them! That's what annoyed me." She vowed never to enter the Bolshoi again.

In 2007, Vishnevskaya starred in Alexander Sokurov's powerful film about the second Chechen War, Alexandra. Many critics named it one of the best films of 2008.

She received countless awards throughout her working life, and just ten days prior to her death received the award "For Service to the Fatherland, 1st Degree," for her distinguished contribution to Russian culture and music.

Rostropovich died in 2007, and Vishnevskaya was buried alongside him in Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery.