Evgeniia Zbrueva

Born Dec. 24, 1867 (Jan. 5, 1868), in Moscow; died there Oct. 20, 1936. Soviet Russian contralto and teacher. Honored Artist of the Republic (1922).

Zbrueva graduated from Moscow Conservatory, where she had studied under E. A. Lavrovskaia, in 1893. She was a soloist at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow from 1894 to 1905 and at the Mariinskii Theater in St. Petersburg from 1905 to 1917. Her voice, rare in its beauty and richness, had an extraordinarily wide range. Resounding with equal quality and strength in all registers, it attained its greatest effectiveness in the cantilena. Zbrueva’s best roles included Vania and Ratmir in Glinka’s Ivan Susanin and Ruslan and Liudmila, Lei’and Nezhata in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden and Sadko, and Marfa in Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina. She created the characters of the Hostess of the Inn in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, and Solokha in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Christmas Eve. Zbrueva also gave concerts; from 1907 to 1912 she toured France and Germany, introducing Russian music to her audiences. She was a professor at the Petrograd Conservatory from 1915 to 1917.