Antonina Nezhdanova (1873–1950) was a Russian and Soviet opera singer and music teacher, known for her lyric-coloratura soprano. She was born on June 16, 1873, in the village of Krivaya Balka, near Odessa, in a family of rural teachers; some sources give her birth date as July 29, 1873. As a child, she sang in church choirs. She attended the Odessa Mariinsky Gymnasium and studied piano in classes run by the Imperial Russian Musical Society, where S. Rubinstein was her music teacher. After graduating, she taught Russian and German at a girls’ school in Odessa and performed at amateur and charity concerts.
In 1902, Nezhdanova graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, where she studied with Umberto Masetti. She was soon invited to join the Bolshoi Theatre as a soloist and worked there for more than thirty years, singing leading roles in operas by Russian and foreign composers. Her best-known roles included Antonida in Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar and Marfa in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride. In 1912, she made her only appearance on a Western European opera stage, singing Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Paris Opera. She also gave concerts abroad and in cities across the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
Alongside opera, Nezhdanova performed chamber vocal music, often in an ensemble with Nikolai Golovanov. Her repertoire included more than 700 works, among them music by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Schubert, and Stravinsky, as well as Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian folk songs and romances. Rachmaninoff dedicated his Vocalise to her; Nezhdanova gave its premiere in St. Petersburg on February 5, 1916. Critics praised her clear tone, accurate intonation, and coloratura technique. She received the title of Honored Artist of the Imperial Theatres in 1912 and was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1936.
From 1936, Nezhdanova taught at the Bolshoi Theatre Opera Studio and the Konstantin Stanislavski Opera Studio. She joined the Moscow Conservatory in 1943 and became a professor that year. She also wrote articles on vocal art, and 11 collections of vocal works were published under her editorship. Nezhdanova died in Moscow on June 26, 1950, and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.