Stanislav Gabel
Stanislav Gabel (1849–1924) was an opera singer, vocal teacher, composer, and director. He was a bass cantante and received the title Honored Artist of the Republic in 1923. He was born in the village of Dudary in Kyiv Governorate.
Gabel grew up in a musical household and began piano lessons at age nine. After studying music and singing at a Kyiv gymnasium, he attended the Warsaw Music Institute from 1866 to 1870. His teachers included Y. Yanota and R. Strobl for piano, F. Ciaffei for singing, and Stanisław Moniuszko for music theory. He continued his studies in Milan and Paris for three years, then returned to Russia in 1874. He performed as both a singer and pianist, including the role of Patsyuk in the second version of Mykola Lysenko’s opera Christmas Night. From 1875 to 1879 he studied singing at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with K. Everardi and V. Samus.
After graduating, Gabel remained at the conservatory as a teacher, first assisting Everardi and then leading his own class from 1884. He became a professor in 1886 and an honored professor in 1911. He headed the solo-singing class and, with I. I. Palechek, the opera class; he also staged student productions of Beethoven’s Fidelio, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, and Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In 1899 he conducted the St. Petersburg premiere of Anton Rubinstein’s opera Among the Robbers. He taught at the St. Petersburg and later Petrograd Conservatories until 1923, completing 44 years of teaching. From 1894 he also worked as a rehearsal coach at the Mariinsky Theatre.
Alongside his teaching, Gabel performed in concerts, including productions of opera scenes and performances with Ukrainian and student choirs. In 1881 he sang the solo part in Verdi’s Requiem at Pavlovsk railway station. He was the first performer of the roles of Kau-Tsing in César Cui’s The Mandarin’s Son (1879), and the Radiant One and Pan Golova in Nikolai Solovyov’s Vakula the Blacksmith (1880).
Gabel composed several romances, published in St. Petersburg in 1881, including settings of poems by Mikhail Lermontov, Konstantin Batyushkov, and Apollon Maykov, as well as translations of poems by Heinrich Heine. He helped compile and edit an 11-volume collection of arias, cavatinas, and romances for singers, published from 1888 to 1890. Vasily Orlov dedicated his romance The Eastern Flower to Gabel in 1896, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov dedicated Echo to him in 1897.