Biography
Galina Pavlovna Vishnevskaya (Гали́на Па́вловна Вишне́вская) (25 October 1926 – 11 December 2012) was a Russian soprano opera singer and recitalist who was named a People's Artist of the USSR in 1966.
In addition to the roles in the Russian operatic repertoire, Vishnevskaya also sung roles such as Violetta, Tosca, Cio-cio-san, Leonore, and Cherubino. She also played the lead role in Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra, a film about the Chechen War that premiered at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
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Vishnevskaya was married to the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich from 1955 until his death in 2007; they performed together regularly (he on piano or on the podium). Both she and Rostropovich were friends of Dmitri Shostakovich, and they made an electrifying recording of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk for EMI. According to Robert Conquest, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn stayed at their dacha from 1968 while writing much of The Gulag Archipelago.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.