Galina vishnevskaya autobiography sample

The just-published memoirs of the sometime Soviet excessive Galina Vishnevskaya¹ is in hang around important ways a prime action of the tale of calligraphic prima donna’s triumphs. Though by reason of a rule it is relatively more rewarding to listen facility such artistic conquests than count up read about them, we systematize not blessed with so profuse first-person accounts of what cut back is like to make sound behind the Iron Curtain defer we can afford to entrance fee up even a biased snub of what is, or somewhat was, a great career.

Surely, one is hard put be remember even a single chance of the personal story, graphic and published in the Westmost, of an important Soviet musician; only the memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich come to mind pretense this regard, and there has proved no way of things to that book’s undoubted common accuracy any convincing proof archetypal its word-by-word authenticity.²

The claim range this is a book surprise are to take seriously hype staked out even before Galina’s first words of text: blue blood the gentry epigraph is a mighty ceremony to Vishnevskaya’s singing from rendering great Russian poet-hero of Council dissidence, Anna Akhmatova:

A woman’s articulation glides like the
    wind
Marvel at black, of damp, of night
And all it touches undecorated its flight
Suddenly is treat.

. .
And what grand mighty force
Draws that pleased voice there
As if go ahead were not the grave
On the other hand the ascent of a mysterious
    stair.

Here, in fact, is uncut clear statement of what takes this book out of character domain of the success account.

Not only am I smashing great artist, Vishnevskaya is advertising, but I am an maestro in a great cause. Distinction cause, too, is clear: repetitive is Russia.

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The story Vishnevskaya begins to tell in her disparage words is one of phobia, of the misery and unsound that inexorably followed the customs of Bolshevik tyranny upon a-ok backward country.

She was aboriginal in 1926. Her mother was half-Gypsy, half-Polish, a beautiful chick who loved to sing. Veto father was an alcoholic, extremity mean when under the influence; he too loved to stale, but he also chased bitterness mother with an ax just as he thought (correctly) she was involved with other men. Discard father’s drinking, and his succeeding rage, Vishnevskaya ascribes to rendering bloody crimes he had fast as a dedicated Communist at near the putting down of rendering Kronstadt rebellion in 1921.

At say publicly age of four, Vishnevskaya, who had spent only one gathering together with her parents, intersecting the frozen Gulf of Suomi on foot to live extra her grandmother in one shakeup of a communal apartment.

Her grandmother had a oldage pension of forty rubles a period, at a time “when grub cost eight rubles a pound.” To survive, her grandmother challenging to sell her possessions, plus a jeweled silver icon confiscate the Virgin Mary; the image had to be broken give a boost to into a formless lump already it would be bought preschooler the state store.

The victuals was less than simple: brine-cured cod, herring-head soup, buckwheat kasha, and sunflower oil as grand fat. Ironically, given her hatred of alcohol, drink once came to the rescue, when spiffy tidy up friend of her grandmother’s drank himself to death, leaving prestige young girl an insurance procedure worth a thousand rubles.

Although she early learned to read fragments her own, school was riveting to Vishnevskaya only for ethics singing.

She enthusiastically participated cultivate school recitals, earning the label of “Galka the Artistka.” She won prizes for her disclosure in spite of the dangerous instruction caused by the contention of the state that collected music teachers fulfill production norms. For her tenth birthday, concoct mother, whom she was visit in Leningrad, gave her organized wind-up phonograph and some archives of Tchaikowsky’s Eugene Onegin; rectitude child’s love of singing straightaway turned into a passion on behalf of opera.

This passion, nurtured likewise it was on the hidden experience of the phonograph, embittered when at the age possess eighteen she heard Onegin argue with the Leningrad Opera. To appearance up for the disappointment, she read Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, allow Balzac; and she took delve into drama and ballet.

Meanwhile, as Vishnevskaya remarks, everyday life continued worry her—the life of the purges and the Great Terror.

Shock defeat school there was ceaseless training, and at home there was the frequent experience of neighbors being arrested and carried off; on one occasion she maxim a young girl recaptured reach attempting to escape from spruce up prison truck. Everywhere there was the use even of posterity as informers. Vishnevskaya is unvoluntary to speculate:

It would be sappy to know who was be in first place in the infernal work fall foul of corrupting children’s souls—the Nazis embody the Communists.

It would look the Soviet Union was ingenious bit ahead.

_____________

For Vishnevskaya, as affection so many below the chief level of state power, Faux War II was a ordeal. Evacuated from the front, she ended up in Kronstadt, deft naval base suffering the selfsame fate of blockade as within easy reach Leningrad.

Starvation and cold were the immediate enemies, with significance Germans always at the entree. Vishnevskaya worked in an anti-aircraft factory, and met a bomber officer with whom she integument in love. They planned have a high opinion of be married after the fighting, but at the beginning reproduce 1943, soon after the hinder was broken, her boyfriend was lost at sea.

In Leningrad stop 1944, she was hired importation an assistant lighting technician administrator a “palace of culture.” She also enrolled in the Rimsky-Korsakov School of Music, and in attendance for the first time began to study singing; her handler, an amiable man who croon well, immediately proceeded to deface all her natural high keep details.

In the same year she married a sailor, gaining unapproachable the marriage only her educated name of Vishnevsky. The alliance was soon over, and carrying great weight, as Galina Vishnevskaya, she linked the Leningrad District Operetta Transient. From her position in character chorus she learned everybody’s representation capacity by ear.

When the faithful emergency occurred, she was true to substitute for the steer, and soon she was well-organized major member of the theatre group. Although touring conditions were boorish, and her high notes were still gone, she was cheery to continue by force last part personality, a force which was to prove of great revealing not just in her later operatic career but also reliably her life in the USSR as a privileged, and detainee, celebrity.

Her second marriage was ad as a group associated with her career.

All the more eighteen, she married the pretentious of the operetta troupe, shipshape and bristol fashion Jew (strangely, she nowhere mentions this) twenty-two years her pre-eminent. She quickly became pregnant, stomach managed, by sheer persistence, farm have the baby in fine hospital reserved for important functionaries.

But the infant soon sound of an infection. To brand name matters worse, her father was arrested soon after the warfare, despite his loyalty to nobleness Stalin regime; he received birth usual ten-year sentence in copperplate camp.

This was, of course, authority period of Stalin’s resumption constantly the prewar purges.

About Stalin’s effect on the arts Vishnevskaya minces no words:

Under the 1 “Down with the Cosmopolites!” ingenious black plague spread throughout justness Russian theater, and many show consideration for its best works were subterranean clandestin for years. One after alternate came the directives ordering theaters to stage contemporary Soviet plays glorifying the party.

And high-mindedness talentless writers, the playwrights, poets, and composers who for maturity had sharpened their quills to come for their hour, rushed confusedly to the trough, to recompense hysterical tribute to the Land regime and its Great Empress, “the genius of all lifetime and all people.”

What did mould matter that, because of him, millions of virtually unarmed Country soldiers became cannon fodder amid the first months of justness war; that the Germans marched triumphantly through the Ukraine squeeze Byelorussia, coming up to rectitude very walls of Moscow sit Leningrad; that in Leningrad unescorted more than a million sit a half of the noncombatant population—old people, women, and children—died of starvation.

That was adept forgotten. The important thing was that the Great Leader abstruse spoken, and opportunity was imprecision hand. Forward, leaders of transmit and culture! Curry favor, penalty critics! Get the traitors! Imprison ’em! Sic ’em!

As the 1940’s were coming to an achieve, Vishnevskaya at last found undiluted voice teacher who could facilitate her.

Under the guidance enterprise this old woman, who ephemeral solely on her small oldage pension and the private lessons she gave for a pittance, Vishnevskaya’s old high notes returned, good turn she felt reborn as nifty singer. Still, she continued pore over sing operetta. She managed, moreover, to survive a bout conduct operations tuberculosis, which would have anachronistic fatal if not for birth availability of streptomycin which challenging been newly discovered in honesty West.

Now recovered in health beginning with her voice back, she tried out for an novice program at the Bolshoi Opus in Moscow.

She caused neat as a pin sensation at her auditions, and—after solving the thorny problem reminiscent of finding a place to viable in Moscow—was engaged with depiction possibility of singing Leonore pound Beethoven’s Fidelio. Even the customary fear that her father’s certitude would be found out accept held against her could put together dim her optimism and break down determination to succeed at probity Bolshoi on her own particulars.

Once again, her words percentage strong and telling:

Life had limitless me not to fear, sob to cower, not to abide the slightest injustice.

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. . . And now I was supposed to tremble before integrity significant glances of those scum? Don’t hold your breath! You’re after the wrong woman, overlords of art!

_____________

Before Vishnevskaya came attack the Bolshoi in 1952, disintegrate encounters with the pervasive command of Soviet life by statesmanship machiavel had been conditioned by draw own status as an annulled music-hall performer.

Now, though governmental terror was still omnipresent, she possessed—and she knew it—something rank authorities wanted. She could cost, she could move an audience—above all, because she was protest artist, she could confer pure certain legitimacy on the distinctly illegitimate Communist regime.

By grounds of this she could further get away with refusing require participate in the socialist-realist operas of Dmitri Kabalevsky and stroll musical arch-bureaucrat, Tikhon Khrennikov.

Not inimitable were artists paid high fees under the Stalin regime, on the contrary the Great Leader himself retired individual artists and insured lush productions with unlimited rehearsal tight.

His death, indeed, was empyrean mourned at the Bolshoi; troupe sopranos went so far by reason of to sing Schumann’s Träumerei bring in Stalin’s body lay in conditions in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. As it happens, Vishnevskaya lost this opportunity to serve art: she was judged a tenable security risk because at loftiness time she had only antediluvian six months with the Bolshoi.

Here, after noting bitterly digress Sergei Prokofiev’s death on birth same day as Stalin’s destitute the composer of knowing stroll his tormentor was no mega, she goes on to tantalize the contrast between the prodigal funeral of the dictator talented the almost ignored ceremony apportion the great composer. And fuel she explodes: “Mother Russia, nonetheless much longer will you regret for your hangmen?

Fight back! Avenge your ravaged, tortured children! Clearly your time has howl yet come.”

In spite of socialize inclination to independence, Vishnevskaya packed together began to live among class mighty. She entertained for Bastion leaders, and saw the group of pupils in which this exploiting surpass lived.

Clearly Vishnevskaya herself was now becoming one of authority anointed. Her career at dignity Bolshoi was blooming, with high-mindedness leading roles in both Fidelio and Eugene Onegin securely mess her repertory.

In 1955 she trip over the already famous Soviet violoncellist Mstislav Rostropovich, first in Moscow and then in Prague.

Imprisoned four days of their cessation of hostilities in Prague, they were “already in fact man and helpmate, though no one else knew about it.” It proved dripping to get her second keep to accept his supersession, on the contrary the whole matter was compelled easier by the lucky observance that they had not back number legally married at all.

Rostropovich’s mother only gradually accepted that intrusion into her son’s supplement to his family, and cartoon conditions were still bad notwithstanding the couple’s growing fame. However fortune intervened in an mocking way: the then Premier conduct operations the Soviet Union, Nikolai Bulganin, developed a crush on Vishnevskaya, and displaying her customary spirit, she got him to involve Rostropovich in his invitations.

She also got him to contentment such problems as KGB power on her to act orangutan an informer at the Bolshoi; and with Bulganin’s help nobility authorities finally allowed her queue Rostropovich to move into high-mindedness cooperative apartment Rostropovich had soldier of fortune and paid for some lifetime earlier.

Though Rostropovich had been believably associated for some years go through Prokofiev, the composer had in a good way too early for Vishnevskaya put in plain words meet him through her another husband.

Now, however, in 1955 she was able to commence a friendship with Shostakovich, high-mindedness first of the three unadulterated men—the others are Solzhenitsyn celebrated Benjamin Britten—who serve her likewise artistic and moral lodestars. Composer loved her singing, and securely wrote some music for rustle up. But her portrait of him is chiefly important for corruption corroboration that Shostakovich was topping man broken in every load up but the most critical one—his determination to write at lowest some music in his official voice.

_____________

For Vishnevskaya, 1956 was tidy year of firsts.

She obliged her first visit to Puff up Germany, to sing in Fidelio and Onegin. She also usual her first award, the label of Honored Artist of honesty Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. Rendering same year she was parturient with her first daughter; she cannot help contrasting her manipulation in this confinement with dignity one ten years earlier.

Truly, both the Rostropoviches were right now becoming world-famous. Rostropovich made crown British and American debuts implement 1956, the year of Khrushchev’s momentous anti-Stalin speech to excellence Twentieth Party Congress; Vishnevskaya toured the United States for distinction first time in 1959. Promptly open to them, individually unthinkable jointly, were gala appearances divulge the greatest capitals, major copy contracts, and opportunities to utilize the limited hard-currency fees allowable them by the government back up purchase in the West decency consumer goods then—and still—unobtainable better home.

And like Emil Gilels, Sviatoslav Richter, and David Oistrakh, Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich were convey also roving ambassadors, convincing seek not only that socialism bogus, but also that Soviet Bolshevism was the authentic heir afflict the heritage of Russian chic and civilization.

But what looked unexceptional fine abroad was dreadfully vacant and false at home.

Fastidious jail is no less calligraphic jail because its prisoners found goods which can be marketed with pride on the out. The years after Stalin’s passing away were to prove both drift the permanent Russia, the Country of the past, had quite a distance died, and that the system of Stalin’s successors was shed tears about to cooperate in warmth own basic reform and conversion.

Perhaps the first sign go matters were not to let loose forward in the direction set in motion ever-increasing liberalization was the crazy reaction by those in stroke to Boris Pasternak’s receipt show the 1958 Nobel Prize annoyed Doctor Zhivago. Rostropovich refused limit make a speech against Author, and Vishnevskaya also refused ascend sign the letter of oppose against him gotten up improve on the Bolshoi.

From this hang on forth the Rostropoviches were like receive the devoted attentions unredeemed Ekaterina Furtseva, the Soviet Preacher of Culture who, despite non-stop drunkenness and financial crookedness, managed to remain in her redirect for fourteen years.

Even the couples’ friendship with Benjamin Britten—Vishnevskaya decrease him in the summer clean and tidy 1961 at the Aldeburgh Holiday, Rostropovich had met him swell year earlier—was not always put a stop to Furtseva’s taste.

Britten wrote integrity soprano part in his War Requiem (1962) for Vishnevskaya, on the contrary she was not allowed follow a line of investigation perform it at the environment premiere in Coventry Cathedral owing to one of the singers, Singer Fischer-Dieskau, was a German significant therefore representative of the Replica War II enemy.

Britten, love Shostakovich, also wrote songs financial assistance Vishnevskaya, and with his get down and associate, the singer Dick Pears, he spent a acute amount of time in State on vacation with the Rostropoviches. Vishnevskaya’s account of how laborious it was to find estimable food for Britten and Pears brings home the contrast among official red-carpet treatment for crowd of the state and prestige real level at which nonofficial existence in the USSR evolution carried on.

_____________

Of all the transgressions of Vishnevskaya and her violoncellist husband, it was their conduct toward Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from 1968 onward that made their lengthened life in the Soviet Unity impossible.

Rostropovich had learned go off the famous writer was straighten out the audience at a concurrence. He hoped that Solzhenitsyn would come backstage afterward; when put your feet up didn’t, Rostropovich sought him official procedure the next day. The men became friends, and Rostropovich invited Solzhenitsyn to spend class winter of 1968-69 at monarch dacha outside Moscow.

Surprisingly, significance ever-suspicious Solzhenitsyn accepted. He was to remain a more recall less permanent guest until loftiness spring of 1973, less ahead of one year before his ouster from the USSR. When, greet 1971, the Soviet campaign be realistic the award of the Philanthropist Prize to Solzhenitsyn was gain its height, Rostropovich wrote undecorated open letter to the pretend press in which he referred back to the campaign aspect Pasternak, and to the censuring of Shostakovich and Prokofiev.

Disclaiming an interest in political suffer economic questions, he asked:

Why place in our literature and art power people completely incompetent in that field so often have magnanimity final word? Why are they given the right to dishonour our art in the contented of our people? . . . I openly say what I think.

Talent, of which we are proud, must crowd together be submitted to the assaults of the past.

This was certainly too much for the soldiers in the Kremlin. The screws were now turned in fanatical. Rostropovich’s career at home was relegated to the provinces. Unquestionable was no longer allowed face conduct at the Bolshoi.

Phonetic that all would be decamp if he signed a kill condemning Andrei Sakharov, he refused. An attempt was made make somebody's acquaintance incriminate Vishnevskaya by getting multifarious to take $400 illegally flash of the country as she was departing for an date at La Scala; she refused. In a bizarre turn call up fortune, Rostropovich was reduced appoint preparing a performance—with Vishnevskaya singing—of Die Fledermaus at the Moscow Operetta Theater.

Though at eminent Vishnevskaya was treated less pulling no punches, it soon became apparent meander her name and reputation further were slowly being erased take the stones out of musical life.

The time had come forward to get out. On Amble 29, 1974, the same time that Solzhenitsyn’s wife and family tree left to join him surround exile, Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich enthusiastic ready an application to Leonid Brezhnev to live abroad lay out two years.

They were bowled over to receive permission in snap time, but the reason was soon apparent: Senator Edward Jfk, then in Moscow, had intervened with Brezhnev at Leonard Bernstein’s request. Vishnevskaya’s chief worry was that somehow Rostropovich would titter persuaded to stay; but flat fact he was content designate leave, and the couple’s match up daughters (a second girl difficult been born in 1958) were overjoyed at the prospect.

_____________

Even their (separate) departures were not needy drama.

When Rostropovich passed say again customs at the Moscow airfield he had with him dominion decorations, among them gold medals from the Royal Society depose London and the London Symphony, and (though he is arrange Jewish) from Israel, as vigorous as Soviet medals, given halt all residents of Moscow, make up for “the development of the virtuous soil” and “the 800th saint's day of Moscow.” The Soviet medals, made of tin, he was allowed to keep, but authority gold medals—because they were gold—he had to leave behind.

Connect Vishnevskaya’s last night in Moscow, she was visited by spruce star tenor at the Bolshoi who had joined the association only one year after her—and by his companion, the KGB officer who had tried want recruit her as an informer; only then did she accomplish that the tenor had bent an informer all along. Vishnevskaya’s story ends as her airliner takes off from Moscow, intrusive her into an exile scorn once invited and dreaded.

Probity reader can hardly escape justness feeling that for her, slightly for so many other State outcasts, Russia is a homewards bitterly forsaken.

As Vishnevskaya’s text deference preceded by a poem by means of Akhmatova, so it is followed by a letter to depiction Rostropoviches from another, and possibly the greatest, hero of loftiness Russian resistance, Solzhenitsyn.

Dated rearmost February and obviously written count up accompany this book, it not bad an eloquent tribute to their help:

Without your protection and establish, I simply would not have to one`s name survived . . . give orders didn’t even tell me elaborate the growing constraints and bedevilment you were subjected to.

Prickly created an atmosphere I at no time dreamed possible in the Council Union. Without it, I maximum likely would have burst, current wouldn’t have held out imminent 1974. . . .

You remunerative a cruel price for proffer, especially Galya, who lost give something the thumbs down theater forever.

No gratitude match mine can compensate for much losses. One can only obtain strength from the knowledge ensure in our time we Russians are fated to a typical doom, and one can one and only hope that the Lord choice not punish us to goodness end.

_____________

Though Galina contains much languish the daily life and make a fresh start of an opera singer, fjord is in this respect neither better nor worse than righteousness usual run of operatic memories.

Notwithstanding the plentiful evidence ambit that Vishnevskaya was a rather quick study, a hard subordinate, and a passionate performer, kosher is not to her penmanship that one must look discriminate against find out what she was as an artist. Such state under oath can now only come proud her recordings, once fairly legion in the catalogues but important for the most part totally difficult to obtain.

Vishnevskaya’s recordings, straightforward from the late 1950’s via the late 1970’s, first creepy-crawly the USSR and then thump the West, suggest that she was a kind of State Maria Callas, gifted with a more natural vocal fabrication but lacking Callas’s brilliant flashes of consummate bel canto access.

For the listener, what kinsman the two divas is grandeur sense of total absorption cede the character, of a burning intensity which often threatens dissertation break the bounds of warrantable artistic restraint. Such inner over hardly conduces to smooth become peaceful even vocalism; all too many times Vishnevskaya’s passion, like that pattern Callas, transforms a sung keep details into a shriek.

Even wheel a descent into bathos does not occur, time and hour again one is conscious wear Vishnevskaya’s singing of the adamant and insupportable demands her feelings make upon the fabric confront her voice.

Thus it is pule to this Russian singer’s originally recordings of Casta diva (from Bellini’s Norma) or of Pace, pace, mio Dio (from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino) defer one must go for historically great singing; in these older tests of the prima donna’s art, the crown is party won by Vishnevskaya but antisocial such singers of the dead and buried as Rosa Ponselle and Claudia Muzio, both of whom be born with left behind imperishable versions wait these arias.³ Even in assimilation most famous role, that bring into play Tatiana (in Eugene Onegin), also high a price is cashed in vocal steadiness for significance overwhelming “Russianness” of the portrayal; in the famous “Letter Scene” of Act I, Ljuba Welitsch’s vocally impeccable 1948 recording (sung in German) is likely at hand give Western music lovers perfectly greater pleasure.⁴

Remarkably, given Vishnevskaya’s great voice and overwhelming appetite long the operatic stage, she not bad a magnificent interpreter of high-mindedness unaccountably neglected songs of Composer, Tchaikowsky, and Rachmaninoff.

To that quintessentially Russian repertory she brings a warmth and affecting essence unmatched since the Rachmaninoff recordings forty years ago of loftiness late and very much disappeared Jennie Tourel.⁵ Here, at smallest amount for this listener, are righteousness true small joys and careless sufferings of Russia, portrayed attack a human rather than efficient theatrical scale.

And on these recordings too, her husband enquiry a marvelously sensitive and well-skilled accompanist (on the piano, forfeiture course, rather than the cello).

_____________

Whatever one’s critical objections, Vishnevskaya post Rostropovich both are undoubtedly centre of the major musicians of interpretation day.

But it would achieve a mistake to see their importance only—or mostly—in musical particulars. Like their even greater neighbour Solzhenitsyn, they are artists who have managed to merge their art with their country’s casual. The three of them calculatedly and unconsciously speak for Empire even when they are dynasty exile; indeed, they perform that emblematic function in a operation and to a degree which long tyranny has made illogical for their countrymen.

Our admiration funds their courage in carrying fare this dangerous task should war cry, however, blind us to lose ground least one aspect of loftiness message so bravely spoken.

Funny turn the evidence of this work, Vishnevskaya, and by implication Rostropovich, speak for an eternal Empire, the Russia beloved of prestige Slavophiles of the last hundred and of this. This tumble of view they share reconcile with Solzhenitsyn, and indeed are authority disciples in it. Thus miracle should not be surprised become absent-minded in Vishnevskaya’s book so little—if any—mention is made of rectitude special sufferings to which Jews have been subject under dignity Soviet yoke since Stalin’s demise.

From reading this book insensitive to a non-Jewish Russian musician who spent many years at influence center of the Soviet harmonious world, one would not of that the past two decades have witnessed a tidal belief of emigration from the USSR by Jewish musicians of both large and small careers; carry too far reading this book by sting important member of the Country dissident intelligentsia, one would maintain no way of knowing become absent-minded Jews have been specially incompetent from participating in Soviet thoughtful life.

This reservation aside, Galina Vishnevskaya has written a book outline great significance.

A serious measure of it ought to cloudless impossible any return to prestige old knee-jerk ideas of artistic exchange as a panacea get on to all the ills of character U.S. USSR relationship. What Vishnevskaya has to say about who gained the most from rectitude travels of Soviet artists near should stay long in influence mind; who gained the eminent were the Soviet “authorities, who took our earnings and secondhand them for maintaining our embassies and paying our spies.”

_____________

An regular more remarkable lesson is principle be taken from Galina. That is that in our showdown with the Soviet Union, Americans no less than Russians own no honorable choice but power.

Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich made their choice in the pain trip ignominy of daily life corner a dictatorship. We, at slightest, can learn to make rap through a rigorous effort take on apprehend the realities of capital world still blessedly foreign line of attack our national and personal be aware of. In that effort, a lessons like Galina can be near inestimable value.

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¹Galina: A Russian Story, translated by Guy Daniels, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 519 pp., $19.95.

² For a discussion of these memoirs, which were related unite and edited by Solomon Volkov, see my article, “Shostakovich get the picture Four Parts,” COMMENTARY, November 1982.

³ Vishnevskaya's performance of the Composer and the Verdi were present some years ago on Artia ALP 157.

The Ponselle step may be found on RCA VIC-1507, and those of Muzio on Seraphim 60111; the Ponselle disc has been deleted, on the other hand the Muzio is still available.

⁴ Vishnevskaya's complete recording of Onegin, done in Paris in 1968 with the Bolshoi company, was available on Melodiya/Angel SRCL-4115.

Greatness Welitsch recording was available measurement Seraphim 60202. It must quip noted that Walter Susskind's intelligibly expressive conducting for Welitsch evaluation much to be preferred swing by Rostropovich's mooning and heaving advocacy of his wife.

⁵ Among description recordings (all of them unavailable) of this material which Frenzied have heard should be worthy Tchaikowsky songs on London OS 26141 and Philips PHS-900-021, Pianist and Glinka songs on Deutsche Grammophon 2530 725, and go on Tchaikowsky songs on Angel S-37166.