Irina Arkhipova was a mezzo-soprano in the great Russian tradition,
best known as Carmen in the classical opera.
She was born Irina Konstantinova Arkhipova on December 2, 1925, in
Moscow, Russia. Her father, Konstantin Ivanovich Vetoshkin, was a
renown construction engineer in Moscow. Her mother, Evdokia Efimovna,
sang at a church choir. Young Arkhipova was fond of music, she studied
piano under Olga Gnesina at the Gnesin Institute. During WWII her
family narrowly escaped from the advancing Nazi Armies and she was
evacuated for 4 years in Tashkent. There she studied as an architect
while taking singing lessons at the same time. In 1945, she was back in
Moscow and continued her studies in both architecture and music. In
1951 she made her radio debut singing traditional Russian romances on
the Moscow Radio. At the same time Arkhipova's architectural plans for
the Moscow University and the Moscow Institute of Finance were approved
and both projects were successfully built, thus propelling Arkhipova's
stellar career as an accomplished architect.
But music won her heart and soul. At the age of 28, Arkhipva entered
the Moscow Conservatory, where she studied with Leonid Savranski. Her
first professional engagement was with the Yekaterinburg (then
Sverdlovsk) opera from 1954 to 1956. In 1955, she won an international
singing competition in Warsaw, which led to her joining the ensemble at
the Bolshoi in Moscow, and she made her debut there in 1956 as Bizet's
Carmen. For the next two decades Arkhipova dominated the mezzo
repertory there, as much because of her versatility and intelligence as
her exceptional qualities of voice. Among her roles were Azucena in Il
trovatore, Marina in Boris Godunov, Marfa in Khovanshchina, Amneris in
Aïda, Eboli in Don Carlo, Charlotte in Werther, Lyubasha in The Tsar's
Bride, Pauline in The Queen of Spades, Lyubov in Mazeppa, Helen in the
Bolshoi premiere of
Sergei Prokofiev's War and
Peace, as well as roles in the premieres of Prokofiev's The Story of a
Real Man and of operas by
Tikhon Khrennikov and Rodion Schedrin.
She made her first appearance in the West in the 1960-61 season as
Carmen at the Teatro San Carlo, Naples and in Opera of Rome. In 1963
she made a sensational tour across Japan. Although European opera
houses slowly adopted the stagione system with its reliance on
employing guest singers ad hoc, the political exigencies of the Cold
War meant that her appearances outside the communist bloc in the years
of her prime, the 1960s and 1970s, were fewer than her admirers would
have liked. Her debut at La Scala, Milan, followed in 1964 when she
appeared with the Bolshoi company as Helen, Marina and Pauline. In 1967
she returned there to sing Marfa and Marina, this time alongside mainly
Italian casts, and again in 1971 (Marfa) and 1973 (Marina). The Bolshoi
company's visit to Paris in 1969 was the occasion of her first
appearances at the Paris Opéra.
In 1972 she made her US debut in San Francisco as Amneris, and the same
year she sang Azucena at Orange County. Her reception at Covent Garden
in 1975 at her debut there, also as Azucena, was equally enthusiastic.
Alan Blyth wrote: "In countless phrases . . . she pierced beneath the
surface of a star-studded performance to what Verdi and the music
really mean." Sadly, Arkhipova was not heard again in London until
1988, by when she had had the best of her voice, and sang a "rather
muted" Mine Arvidson in Un ballo in maschera. In 1992 she made a
belated debut at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, with the Kirov Opera
company as the old Countess in The Queen of Spades.
During her 40-year career, Arkhipova sung in over 40 different operatic
roles. She recorded over twenty operas and also made several solo
albums, which sold millions of copies. Of one of her records the critic
J. B. Steane commented: "Her voice rings out strong and clear, without
divisions of register and with complete freedom from throaty
constrictions . . . a gloriously healthy sound." He thought her the
best Russian singer of the 1960s, and the chance of hearing her a more
than adequate reason on its own for facing the inconveniences that then
beset the traveler to Russia.
Despite an addiction, common in Russian singers of her time, to a
distinctly old-fashioned range of gesture, Arkhipova came vividly to
life on stage. Her voice, in its best days, was a magnificent
mezzo-soprano of a weight and range that made her consistently
successful also in the darkest contralto parts. She was a master of the
art of acting with the voice; her early recording of Carmen's
Seguedille was called by Rodney Milnes "quite wonderful: light, playful
yet forceful ... and gloriously musical". Her Marina with the Bolshoi
was described as "authoritatively sung, sharply characterized".
Irina Arkhipova is in the Russian national hall of fame as the singer
with most prizes, awards and decorations. A small planet No 4424 is
named Arkhipova in her honor. She was designated Honorable Actress of
Russia and People's Actress of the USSR, and also received numerous
awards and decorations from the Soviet state and from the Russian
government. Arkhipova was active in various cultural projects in Russia
and internationally. She sang for dignitaries and politicians, such as
Nikita Khrushchev and
Leonid Brezhnev,
Queen Elizabeth II,
Mikhail Gorbachev,
Pope John Paul II and other
international figures. Among the highlights of her career were
performances at the Bolshoi Theatre, Kirov Opera, Covent Garden Opera,
Paris Opera, Metropolitan Opera and at many other classical venues
across the world.
Arkhipova was president of the Tchaikovsky International Competition
for 30 years. In addition, she was a jury member of international
competitions in Athens (Maria Callas), Barcelona (Francisco Vinas),
Munich, Sofia, New York (Rosa Ponselle), Tokyo (Minon), Brussels (Queen
Elizabeth), Bussetto (Voci Verdiane), Treviso (Mario del Monaco) and
Cardiff (BBC). For 40 years she was professor at the Moscow
Conservatory and many of her students have become prize-winners in
international competitions and are performing in opera houses around
the world. She was vice president of The Academy of the Creative Arts
and president of both the International Union of Musicians and the
Irina Arkhipova Foundation in Moscow.
Irina Arkhipova wrote three books: 'My Muzes' (1992), 'Music of My
Life' (1997) and 'I am the brand' (2005). She was married to singer
Vladislav Pyavko and the couple had one
son. She died of a heart failure on February 11, 2010, aged 84, and was
laid to rest next to Russian culture luminaries in Novodevichy Cemetery
in Moscow, Russia.
