Musical predilections of the Emperor: Favorite performers of Tsar Nicholas II

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

In pre-revolutionary Russia, special attention was paid to the musical education of children from noble families. At the same time, girls were necessarily taught to play music and sing, and boys had to understand music. Naturally, the last emperor of Russia, Nicholas II, was also musically educated. He himself could play the piano, but he was not fond of playing music and did not sing, even though he understood music, he loved romances and folk songs.

Varya Panina

At the beginning of the twentieth century, gypsy music turned out to be in vogue in Russia, and the first star was Varya Panina, whose vocal abilities were admired by Fyodor Chaliapin himself, who repeatedly attended the singer's performances in the fashionable Yar restaurant in Moscow.

The performer was short, suffered from overweight, smoked cheap cigarettes and performed always sitting, rising from a chair only to bows, with which she rarely indulged her audience. However, she possessed outstanding vocal abilities. In 1906, the glory of Varvara Panina reached St. Petersburg and it was decided to invite her to the Mariinsky Theater with a recital.

The entire imperial family was present at the concert, and after its completion, Varya Panina was honored with the visit of Nicholas II. The emperor jokingly reprimanded the performer for the fact that there was not a single recording of the singer in his collection, which the whole of Russia listens to. The representative of the "Gramophone" company, who was present during the conversation between the tsar and Varya Panina, immediately took note of everything, and soon the emperor was presented with an amazing deluxe edition, which included 20 records of the gypsy singer.

Two songs from the repertoire of Varya Panina were most loved by the tsar: "Swan Song" and "We were young with you." The words for the last romance were written by the Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich. Unfortunately, the talented performer died very early, in 1911, when she was only 38 years old.

Nadezhda Plevitskaya

She was a real prima donna, but she sang not gypsy, but Russian folk songs. The emperor was introduced to the work of the performer by Baron Fredericks, through whose efforts the singer became a participant in concerts at the court. There is evidence of how Nicholas II, during the performances of Nadezhda Plevitskaya, did not hesitate to sob while listening to compositions about the hard life of the peasants.

Nadezhda Plevitskaya began to sing in Kiev, in the chapel of Alexandra Lipkina, changing the maid's uniform to a concert dress. The girl, who was born into a peasant family, did not know literacy and did not study music, but her vocal talent and absolute ear for music allowed her to become a professional singer. She performed in the "choir of lapotniks" by Minkevich, and then began to sing in the same restaurant "Yar", from where Vary Panina's fame began.

The famous opera singer Leonid Sobinov heard Plevitskaya at Naumov's restaurant during the Nizhny Novgorod Fair, and then helped the performer organize performances at the Moscow Conservatory. Nadezhda Plevitskaya enjoyed incredible popularity, was friends with Fyodor Chaliapin and the actors of the Art Theater.

With the light hand of Nicholas II, the performer began to be called the "Kursk nightingale", and the wife of the emperor, Alexandra Fedorovna, even presented Nadezhda Plevitskaya with a diamond brooch in the shape of a beetle.

Having risen from the bottom, Nadezhda Plevitskaya began to receive very high fees for her performances, but she never refused to help those in need and was one of the famous philanthropists. During the First World War, she worked as a nurse in an infirmary, after the revolution she emigrated to France, where in 1937 she was sentenced to 20 years in hard labor for cooperation with the NKVD and complicity in the abduction of Yevgeny Miller, General P. N. Wrangel's chief commissioner for military and naval affairs. … Nadezhda Plevitskaya ended her days in a women's prison in Rennes in 1940.

Yuri Morfessi

Fyodor Ivanovich Chaliapin christened Yuri Morfessi "the accordion of the Russian song", and journalists and fans added to this title something else: "the prince of the gypsy song." In the 1910s, Yuri Morfessi was at the peak of his fame. He had many of the highest-ranking fans, the singer's fees were unusually high. The artist's income allowed him to purchase a luxurious apartment in St. Petersburg on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt and open his own restaurant "Ugolok".

In the summer of 1914, he gave a private concert on the yacht "Polar Star" in front of the emperor's family. Nicholas II listened to the singer with undisguised pleasure, and after that he personally shook hands with Yuri Morfessi, thanking him for the pleasure.

A month after the performance, the performer was presented with cufflinks with diamond eagles as a gift from Emperor Nicholas as a token of gratitude. A three-day guest trip of the singer on the imperial yacht was planned, but these plans were not given to be realized due to the First World War.

After the revolution, Yuri Morfessi settled in Odessa, where he opened the Artist's House and organized performances of famous performers there, and then emigrated. At first he sang in Paris, Belgrade, Zagreb. With the outbreak of World War II, he became a member of the Russian Corps concert brigade, toured and recorded his records in Berlin. After the defeat of the Germans, he settled in Füssen, where he died in 1949.

Reading was another integral and very important part of the life of the royal family. Their range of interests covered both serious historical literature and entertainment novels. The personal library of Nicholas II consisted of more than 15 thousand volumes and was constantly replenished.