Maria Bieșu was a Soviet and Moldovan opera singer, soprano, and teacher. She was born on 3 August 1935, according to other sources on 5 May 1934, in the village of Volintiri, in Cetatea Albă County, Bessarabia, Kingdom of Romania, now in Moldova. She died on 16 May 2012 in Chișinău, Moldova.
She finished school in her native village and in 1951 entered the agricultural and forest reclamation faculty of an agricultural technical school in Leova. She sang in amateur performances, and in 1955 she was admitted without examinations to the Chișinău State Conservatory, now the Academy of Music, Theatre and Fine Arts, where she studied with the teacher S. L. Zarifyan for four years. While still a student, from 1958 to 1960 she performed with the folk-instrument orchestra of the song and dance ensemble Flueraș.
In 1961 she graduated from the conservatory in the class of P. A. Botezat and immediately after her state examinations was invited to the Moldavian Opera and Ballet Theatre in Chișinău. Her operatic stage debut came in the spring of 1962, when she sang Tosca in Puccini's opera. From 1965 to 1967 she trained at La Scala in Milan under the guidance of E. Piazza, preparing in Italian the roles of Tosca, Aida, Cio-Cio-San, and Leonora in operas by Puccini and Verdi.
During the same period she achieved international recognition in vocal competitions. At the Third International Tchaikovsky Competition she became a prize winner in the first singers' contest, receiving third prize in 1966. She then won the First International Tamaki Miura Memorial Competition in Japan, where she received first prize, the Golden Cup, and the title of Best Cio-Cio-San in the World.
After that, Bieșu began an intensive international career with new roles, premieres, tours on all continents, recordings, and film appearances. She sang at the Bolshoi Theatre, on the opera stages of leading theatres of the Soviet Union, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and in theatres in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Finland, and Austria. She also toured in Japan, Australia, Cuba, and Israel, gave solo concerts in Rio de Janeiro, and sang at the Olympia hall in Paris.
Her repertoire included about thirty soprano roles from the world operatic classics and operas by contemporary composers. It also included a broad chamber repertoire with more than twenty concert programs, featuring famous opera arias and works of early, classical, sacred, and contemporary music. Among the roles named in the article are Tosca, Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, Aurelia in Aurelia, Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly, Lisa in The Queen of Spades, Aida, Desdemona in Otello, Leonora in Il trovatore, and Domnica in Heroic Ballad.
Alongside her performing career, she taught a vocal class as a professor at the G. Musicescu Academy of Music in Chișinău, now the Academy of Music, Theatre and Fine Arts. She also gave master classes for vocal students at the University of the Arts in Nagoya in 1999, at the Beijing and Vienna conservatories, and in opera theatres in Ankara, Mersin, and Havana. She took part in Moldova's musical and festival life, and from 1990 Chișinău hosted the International Festival of Opera and Ballet Stars Invites Maria Bieșu.
She continued to appear in concerts and opera performances in later years, including performances in six European capitals in 2001 with a program of romances by Romanian and Moldovan composers to poems by Mihai Eminescu. In the final years of her artistic life she remained active in Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Japan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Her artistic legacy also includes films and television films in which she appeared, as well as numerous recordings of arias, songs, romances, and complete opera performances. She also served for many years on the juries of major international vocal competitions, including the Tchaikovsky, Glinka, and Sviridov competitions.
Bieșu received many distinctions during her career. Among those mentioned in the article are the title Hero of Socialist Labor in 1990, People's Artist of the USSR in 1970, the Lenin Prize in 1982, and the USSR State Prize in 1974. She died in a hospital in Chișinău after suffering for several years from a rare form of leukemia and was buried at the Central Armenian Cemetery in Chișinău.