Sergei Lemeshev

Sergey Lemeshev is a Soviet opera singer (lyric tenor), actor, director, teacher. From a peasant family. Parents - Yakov Stepanovich and Akulina Sergeevna, were uneducated people. They had many children, but only two survived - Sergey and his younger brother Aleksey. His father died when Sergey was still little. In 1914 he graduated from parochial school. He studied shoemaking in St. Petersburg. Having an excellent ear for music and voice, he learned to sing from gramophone recordings. He mastered musical notation at an arts and crafts school, where he participated in amateur performances and concerts. In 1920 he entered the Tver exemplary courses for the command staff of the Red Army. However, he did not study there for long; noticing Lemeshev's talent, the command gave him a direction to study at the conservatory. In 1921-1925 he studied at the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Nazariy Rayskiy. Since 1924, he sang at the Bolshoy Theater Opera Studio under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavski (now the Moscow Musical Theater named after Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko), where, among others, he performed the role of Lenskiy (opera by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky "Evgeniy Onegin"). It was this role, which the singer performed more than 500 times, that brought him widespread fame and love from the audience. The 501st and last performance took place at the Bolshoy Theater in June 1972 in honor of the singer's upcoming 70th birthday. In addition to singing in opera performances, he worked hard and fruitfully on performing chamber repertoire. He himself proudly noted that he managed to sing all 100 romances of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In 1959-1962 he directed the Opera Studio at the Moscow Conservatory, where he staged several performances.