Video: A German with a Russian soul: an opera singer with a unique voice who sang Russian folk songs
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Ivan Rebrov (real name - Hans-Rolf Rippert) was unique in everything: height under 2 meters, voice 4, 5 octaves, 49 gold discs and 1 platinum, manner of performing in trousers, caftan and fur hat, Russian pseudonym, etc. Thanks his ingenious ability to perform any part - from tenor to bass - Ivan Rebrov got into the Guinness Book of Records.
Ivan Rebrov was born in 1931, on a train between Warsaw and Paris, and spent his childhood in Germany. His mother, Natalya Nelina, knew many figures of Russian culture and was well acquainted with Fyodor Chaliapin. Hans's father was German, but with Russian roots. When the Nazis came to power, the family left the country and returned back only in 1953.
Parents raised their son in the spirit of Russian culture, the mother often sang folk songs to him. After graduating from the conservatory in Hamburg, where Hans studied singing, piano and violin, he won the All-German Young Singers Competition and began performing in opera. Hans was admitted to the Black Sea Cossack Choir - a well-known group of Russian emigrants in Germany. The choir leader A. Sholukh advised the student: "If you want to make a career with Russian songs, sing only in Russian!" Then the pseudonym Rebroff appeared - as a result of the translation of the German surname into Russian.
36 out of 50 records by Ivan Rebrov are dedicated to Russian song folklore. Over the 30 years of the singer's creative activity, 10 million discs with recordings of his songs have been sold. While in the West he gained wide popularity, in the USSR his name was known only to a narrow circle of collectors. He was not allowed to give concerts here, and no records were released. In the 1960s-1970s. Rebrov twice visited the USSR as a tourist, and only with the beginning of perestroika was he able to come here on tour.
Ivan Rebrov confessed: “I adore Russian music, Russian culture, Russian traditions. Russia is my spiritual homeland, the homeland of my heart! " In the late 1980s. his work was finally noticed in the USSR. After his concert in 1988, Izvestia published a review: “It is not often that nature endows people with such a voice and such efficiency. The singer gives about 200 concerts a year, and fluently knows four and a half octaves, performs liturgies, arias from operas, romances and folk songs."
In Russia, Rebrov was received much cooler than in the West. Here his style seemed pseudo-Russian, and his manner of dressing in caftans and fur hats seemed kitsch. To accusations of the artificiality of his love for Russian culture, Rebrov replied: “I do not like narrow one-dimensional definitions. It seems to me that I am some kind of prehistoric creature. I have a German heart, a Greek mentality and a Russian soul, which is so strong that I willingly compare it to a black hole in the Universe, so great is the force of its attraction."
During a tour in West Germany, Ivan Rebrov was often heard by Lyudmila Zykina, who left interesting memories of this: “He amazes with his truly outstanding voice. For the Western public, he is a "condovy Slav" with a thick beard and an Arkhirus name. His concert costume certainly includes a sable hat and a catchy, bright caftan with a sash embroidered with gold. Rebrov's popularity consists, in my opinion, of several components: good vocal skills, an exotic appearance, a stage image of a kind of dumpy Russian bear, an emphasis on melancholic and sad Russian songs that find a special response among the sentimental Western public. With his notes, Ivan Rebrov is clearly trying to please the philistine taste of ordinary people who know, or rather, who do not want to know more about Russia, only for vodka and caviar."
Until the last days Ivan Rebrov was active in concert, despite his health problems. In 2008, at the age of 77, he died of cardiac arrest. Whatever evaluation his work received, one cannot fail to note his contribution to the popularization of Russian songs abroad. Rebrov was called a spiritual son Chaliapin, during whose tour in America funny curiosities happened
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