Vladimir Nardov (born Vladimir Leonidovich Knipper) was an opera singer, tenor, and opera director. He was named an Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1933. He was born in Moscow on June 22, 1876, and died there on November 12, 1942.
From 1895 to 1902, he studied mathematics and law at Moscow University while taking vocal lessons from his mother. He had studied violin with Nikolai Sokolovsky from 1893 and played in a children’s orchestra led by Anatoly Erarsky. He later performed in a student orchestra conducted by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov. After university, he worked for two years as an assistant to a barrister in Moscow, then continued his vocal studies in Berlin and Dresden. From 1907 to 1914, he performed in cities across Germany. In 1914, he made his debut at Sergei Zimin’s Opera Theater; he later performed at other Moscow theaters and joined the Bolshoi Theater, where he worked from 1920 to 1936.
His operatic repertoire included 137 roles, among them Almaviva in The Barber of Seville, Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni, Triquet in Eugene Onegin, Shuisky in Boris Godunov, and Faust in Faust. He also sang in operettas, including the role of Paris in Jacques Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, and performed chamber works and romances by Mikhail Glinka, Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, and Hector Berlioz.
Nardov began directing opera in 1918 and staged 30 operas during his career. His Bolshoi Theater productions included The Pearl Fishers, Die Walküre, Sadko, The Tsar’s Bride, La Traviata, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya. He also taught opera: he led the opera class at the Gnesin School from its establishment in 1919 and headed an opera class at the Moscow Conservatory from 1923 to 1928. From 1940 he was a professor there and headed the stagecraft department in 1940–41. His students included Sergei Lemeshev, Nikandr Khanaev, Vladimir Slivinsky, and Sergei Krasovsky.
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