Product Description
Galina: A Russian Story by Galina Vishnevskaya. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. First edition. 527 pages. Translated by Guy Daniels. Several sections of black and white photographs. Hardcover in chipped dustjacket, now in protective clear Mylar jacket cover. Internally clean and tight.
Galina Pavlovna (1926-2012) was one of Russia's most famous opera divas, a soprano and recitalist and the wife of cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1927-2007). Her memoir details her rise from poverty in Stalinist Russia to stardom and her defection to the West in 1973. She knew many personalities: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Yevtushenko and Solzhenitsyn, among others.
Among her many recordings were Eugene Onegin (1956 and 1970), Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death (1961 and 1976), Britten's War Requiem, Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (1970 and 1987), Puccini's Tosca (1976), Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1978), Tchaikovsky's Iolanta (1984) and Prokofiev's War and Peace (1986).