Yevmen Marykivskyi

Yevmen Marykivskyi was a Ukrainian Soviet choirmaster and teacher, born on 23 September 1899 in the village of Severynivka, now in the Kamianka District of Moldova. He studied first at the religious school in Tyvriv, graduating in 1914, where his singing teacher and choir director was Kyrylo Stetsenko. In 1918 he completed the Odessa Theological Seminary, and in 1928 he graduated from the Mykola Lysenko Kyiv Music and Drama Institute, where he studied with Mykhailo Verykivskyi. In 1928–1929 he continued his studies there in the opera-symphonic department.

From 1929 to 1935 Marykivskyi lived in Sumy, where he taught music at the Sumy Pedagogical Institute and the music technical school. During this period he organized and led the choir chapel Surma, whose repertoire included works by Mykhailo Verykivskyi, Pylyp Kozytskyi, Mykola Lysenko, Mykola Leontovych, and Lev Revutskyi.

Between 1935 and 1938 he worked as chief choirmaster of the Donetsk Opera in Voroshylovhrad. There he took part in productions of a wide range of operas, including Semen Hulak-Artemovsky's Zaporozhets za Dunayem, Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Cherevichki and The Queen of Spades, Alexander Borodin's Prince Igor, Anton Rubinstein's The Demon, Georges Bizet's Carmen, Charles Gounod's Faust, and Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata and Rigoletto.

From 1938 to 1945 he served as chief choirmaster of the Gorky Opera Theatre. Together with Oleksandr Yerofeyev he staged, for the first time there, Hulak-Artemovsky's Zaporozhets za Dunayem in 1939 and Mykola Lysenko's Natalka Poltavka in 1942. At the same time he also taught at the Gorky Music School.

In 1945–1946 Marykivskyi was chief conductor of the Kyiv Opera Theatre, and from 1946 to 1952 he held the same position at the Kharkiv Opera Theatre. As a conductor he led productions including Kostiantyn Dankevych's Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Verdi's Aida and Un ballo in maschera, and Tchaikovsky's The Maid of Orleans.

Later in his career he was artistic director of the Kharkiv Choral Chapel from 1953 to 1955 and led the amateur choral chapel of the Kharkiv Institute of Railway Transport Engineers from 1953 to 1979. He also taught at the Kharkiv Conservatory from 1946 to 1960 and at the Kharkiv State Institute of Culture from 1960 to 1971. He was the author of the memoir "From Distant Childhood," published in a volume on Kyrylo Stetsenko in 1981.

Marykivskyi died in Kharkiv on 17 January 1986. His long career connected choral training, opera production, and music education across several Soviet Ukrainian and Russian institutions, and he remained especially associated with the musical life of Kharkiv in his later decades.

Connections

This figure has 2 connections in the Music Lineage catalog.