Sofia Maykapar, née Isakovich, was a Russian and Soviet chamber and opera singer and music teacher. She toured in Russia and abroad in the early twentieth century under the stage name Nina Ormelli. She was also known as the first woman in Russia to fly in an airplane as a passenger.
She was born on June 19, 1881, in Yevpatoria, Taurida Governorate. Her father, Emmanuel Solomonovich Isakovich, was a hereditary honorary citizen and the owner of a photography studio in Rostov-on-Don at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Her mother, Firsin Yufudovna Egiz, came from the petty bourgeois class of Yevpatoria. She studied singing privately in Germany.
From 1905 to 1914, before the beginning of the First World War, she toured together with her husband Samuil Maykapar in Germany, Austria, and France. In Germany their concerts were held in Berlin, Cologne, Erfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Koblenz, and other cities. From the beginning of 1911, the St. Petersburg Conservatory professor and violinist I. R. Nalbandyan also took part in the concert activity of the Maykapars. In 1912 and 1913, Maykapar was an opera soloist in Teplice, Austria.
In Germany, Sofia and Samuil Maykapar were connected through artistic friendship with such musicians as the pianists Ossip Gabrilowitsch and Ignaz Friedman, the violinist Efrem Zimbalist, and the German composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert. They were especially close to the composer Alexander Grechaninov. German concert programs show that Sofia Maykapar was among the first performers of a number of Grechaninov's vocal works.
After returning from touring to Russia, she devoted herself to teaching. Living in Moscow, she taught singing at the S. I. Taneyev Music School and the V. V. Stasov Musical Technical School. From 1938 to 1948 she worked as a senior teacher at GITIS, while also leading vocal classes at the Vakhtangov Theatre.
On July 30, 1910, at the Johannisthal airfield in Berlin, she flew in pilot Keidel's Farman airplane. Before her own flight, she had to watch the unsuccessful landing of another airplane, but this did not stop her. The event became a sensation at the beginning of the twentieth century, and she entered history as the first woman in Russia to make a flight in an airplane as a passenger.
She died in 1956 in Moscow.
Connections
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