Oda Slobodskaya
| Oda Slobodskaya | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Background information | |
| Also known as | Odali Careno |
| Born | 1888 Vilno, Russian Empire |
| Died | 1970 London |
| Occupation(s) | Opera singer |
Oda Slobodskaya (28 November 1888 - 30 July 1970) was a Russian born soprano who became a British citizen.
Her biographer Maurice Leonard quotes Slobodskaya as having been born on 28 November 1888 in Vilno (now Vilnius) near the Polish border. She won a scholarship for secondary education but, having completed her schooling, to her displeasure, found herself working with her parents in a secondhand clothes shop. Knowing she had a good voice, in 1907 she applied for an audition at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Having no classical repertoire she sang the simple songs she had learned as a chlld. Despite this lack of sophistication, her vocal potential was immediately apparent. The Director, Glazunov, and Natalya Iretskaya (the most important Russian singing tutor and herself a pupil of Pauline Viardot) accepted her and awarded her a scholarship for nine years' study.
In 1916 she made her debut, as Lisa in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades the Mariinsky Theatre. She sang with the company for the next five years and performed many of the principal soprano parts of the Russian repertory as well as Sieglinde, Marguerite in Faust, Elisabeth de Valois, and Aida. The revolution having broken out, she was ordered to join other singers on obligatory tours to factories and farms to entertain the workers and there met the bass Fyodor Chaliapin.
In 1921 she fled from Russia to Berlin where she was soon invited to sing. Success there brought a call from Diaghilev to join him in Paris to star in the premiere of Stravinsky’s opera Mavra in 1922. Chaliapin then invited her to be principal soprano in the company he was forming to tour Western Europe and she sang with him in Paris.
...
Wikipedia