Osip Petrov

Osip Afanasyevich Petrov (Yelizavetgrad, now Kirovohrad, 1806 – St Petersburg, 1878) was one of the great basses of nineteenth-century Russian opera and a decisive figure in the consolidation of a national repertoire. Born in a town in Ukraine, he was trained within the sphere of church music and, being largely self-taught, learnt the guitar and clarinet before turning to stage singing.

His career began in 1826 with Zhurakhovsky's touring company, with a debut in Yelizavetgrad in Cavos's The Cossack Poet. Shortly afterwards he joined Ivan Stein's company, where he worked alongside the actor Mikhail Shchepkin, whose influence was considerable. With help from Cavos in singing and from Hunke in piano and theory, he progressed rapidly, performing a wide variety of operatic genres and also appearing in spoken drama. He made his St Petersburg debut in 1830 and soon achieved wide recognition.

At the premiere of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar (1836) he created a interpretation of Ivan Susanin of tremendous dramatic force, to the extent that, according to Glinka himself, the Polish chorus members attacked him with such violence that he had to defend himself in earnest. Among others, he created roles in Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842), in Dargomyzhsky's The Miller (1856), in Serov's Judith and Rogneda, in Rimsky-Korsakov's The Maid of Pskov, in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov (Varlaam) and in Rubinstein's The Demon. In 1876 the Mariinsky Theatre celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his stage career with a gold medal and a gold crown set with diamonds.

His voice, of wide range, and his skill as a character actor earned him a reputation for warmth and depth. His legacy is twofold: he performed Italian and French roles with distinction, but above all he embodied Russian types with a bass timbre of genuinely Russian character, which served as a model and inspiration for many composers. Stasov regarded him as one of the founders of Russian opera as we know it.