Lydia Lipkovskaya was an opera and operetta singer, chamber singer, vocal teacher, and poet. She was a lyric coloratura soprano, born in 1884 in Babin, in the Bessarabian Province of the Russian Empire. She began singing at the age of five, sang in a church choir from the age of twelve, and took part in charity concerts from fourteen. At seventeen, she married university student Christopher Marshner and moved with him to St. Petersburg, where they had a daughter. She left him two years later after he opposed her wish to study singing.
In 1903, Lipkovskaya entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory to study voice with Natalia Iretskaya. She made her stage debut in 1904, singing Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto at a private opera performance after replacing an ill singer without rehearsals. She graduated and joined the Mariinsky Theatre in 1906, where Gilda was her first role. Her repertoire there included Olympia in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and Rosina in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. She also appeared at the Bolshoi Theatre and performed with Fyodor Chaliapin and Leonid Sobinov. Audiences and critics praised her coloratura, musicality, and command of the high register.
From 1909, Lipkovskaya performed internationally, including at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and Covent Garden in London. In the United States, she appeared with Enrico Caruso in Rigoletto and La traviata, and met and performed with Giacomo Puccini and Titta Ruffo. Her roles included Mimi in Puccini’s La bohème, Susanna in Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s The Secret of Susanna, and Lakmé in Delibes’s opera of that name. She also performed in cities including Moscow, Kyiv, Odesa, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, and Harbin, and took part in Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons.
From 1919, Lipkovskaya lived and worked abroad, teaching in Chisinau and Bucharest while continuing to perform in Europe and the Americas. She later taught in Timisoara and Paris, and in 1953 was invited to direct the Beirut Conservatory. Poor health prevented her from taking up the work, and she spent her final years in hardship. She died in Beirut on March 22, 1955; some sources give 1958. Her recorded repertoire included arias and scenes from operas by Rossini, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Verdi, Gounod, and Puccini.