Nadezhda Golubovskaya

Nadezhda Iosifovna Golubovskaya (30 August 1891 – 5 December 1975) was a Russian pianist, harpsichordist, and music teacher. She was born in St. Petersburg and was later awarded the title Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic on 21 February 1938.

She was born into the family of Iosif Borisovich Golubovsky, a cashier at the St. Petersburg branch of the Siberian Trade Bank. The family lived on Panteleimonovskaya Street, number 5. She received her general education at the girls' gymnasium of Petrischule from 1900 to 1907, and in 1914 she graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory. There she studied with Alexandra Rozanova and Sergei Lyapunov, who dedicated his Sonatina, Op. 65 to her. It is considered that at her graduation examination she was Sergei Prokofiev's main rival for the highest graduation award, the Anton Rubinstein Medal, though Prokofiev won the contest.

Golubovskaya performed publicly from 1915. In 1917 she gave her first solo concert, and a review by the music critic Vyacheslav Karatygin noted in her playing much subtle poetry and living feeling, with great rhythmic clarity combined with emotional passion and nervous intensity. At the same time she also appeared as an accompanist, including in collaborations with the singer Zoya Lodiy and the violinist Mikhail Reyson.

In 1923 she spent three months in Berlin in further study, focusing on harpsichord playing. From the 1930s through the 1960s a number of recordings of her performances were made, mostly from radio broadcasts. These included Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 and several solo works, Chopin's Sonata No. 3, and works by Jean-Philippe Rameau, Domenico Scarlatti, and George Frideric Handel. In the postwar years, however, she devoted most of her attention to teaching, although memoirists recalled her frequent summer concerts in Tarusa.

Golubovskaya made an enormous contribution to Soviet piano pedagogy. From 1920 she taught at the Leningrad Conservatory, where she became a professor in 1935 and trained many concert pianists. Among her students were N. Shchemelinova, V. Nielsen, M. Karandasheva, A. Ugorsky, G. Talroze, and E. Shishko.

From 1941 to 1944 she served as head of the piano department at the Ural Conservatory, and from 1945 to 1963 she was a consultant to the Tallinn Conservatory. Her life and work were the subject of a study published in 1978 by her student E. Bronfin. Golubovskaya was also the author of works on performance and piano technique, including The Art of Pedaling, The Art of the Performer, and On Musical Performance.

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