Varvara Zarudnaya
Varvara Zarudnaya (also known by her married name, Ippolitov-Ivanov) was an opera singer, a lyric soprano, and a vocal teacher. She was born in Yekaterinoslav on 17 December 1857 (5 December under the Julian calendar) and died in Moscow on 14 March 1939. She married the composer and conductor Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov in 1883.
After studying at the Kharkiv Music School, Zarudnaya entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1879. She graduated with a silver medal in 1882, having studied with Natalia Iretskaya, Henriette Nissen-Saloman, and Camillo Everardi. Everardi’s teaching methods shaped her later work as a teacher. While a student, she began performing in private concerts hosted by prominent musicians, singing excerpts from operas. Alexander Borodin took her vocal abilities into account when composing the role of Yaroslavna in Prince Igor.
Zarudnaya performed as an opera and concert singer in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Tbilisi, Irkutsk, Kazan, Kaluga, and at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. She worked in Tbilisi from 1883 to 1893 and sang some arias in Georgian. Her roles included Antonida in A Life for the Tsar, Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, Maria in Mazeppa, and Tamara in The Demon. She was the first performer of roles in Ippolitov-Ivanov’s operas Ruth and Azra. Her concert repertoire included opera arias, symphonic works, and Russian and Ukrainian folk songs.
Alongside performing, Zarudnaya taught in Tbilisi and helped establish its music school, where she taught about 40 students and organized student performances of operas and excerpts. From 1893 to 1924 she taught at the Moscow Conservatory, becoming a professor in 1903 and an honored professor in 1914. In 1917, she and her husband founded the Pyotr Tchaikovsky Vocal Studio at the conservatory, where students staged operas by Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky. Ippolitov-Ivanov dedicated his opera Asya and the song Alsatian Ballad to her. Zarudnaya’s writings included On Singing, Teaching, and Opera (1921) and Art of Singing (1924–25); she also published her correspondence with Pyotr Tchaikovsky.