Vishnevskaya autobiography

By Sebastian Spreng, Visual Artist and Classical Music Writer

Galina Vishnevskaya was, above all, a survivor.

Her life was out of an opera. Were only half of what she relates in her autobiography true, it would be enough to merit unconditional admiration. Everything was extreme in the tumultuous life of the mythical Vishnevskaya. Her book – Galina: a Russian Story – even inspired an opera by Marcel Landowski.

Abandonment, tuberculosis, poverty, war, the siege of Leningrad, hardship and what was yet to come, almost as intense as what had gone before…

Vishnevskaya was the muse of composers like Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Britten and poet Anna Akhmatova (she wrote “On hearing Vishnevskaya sing Mozart”), Prima Donna Assoluta of the Bolshoi Theater of the 50s and 60s; and a prime export of the Soviet regime (as many others like Maya Plisetskaya and Mstislav Rostropovich, Vishnevskaya’s third husband and fat