Mariia Adrianovna Deisha-Sionitskaia

Born Oct. 22 (Nov. 3), 1859, in Chernigov; died Aug. 25, 1932, in Koktebel’, now Planerskoe. Soviet Russian dramatic soprano, public figure in music, and teacher.

Deisha-Sionitskaia graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1881 and perfected her art in Vienna and Paris. She was a soloist at the Mariinskii Theater in St. Petersburg from 1883 to 1891 and at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow from 1891 to 1908. Her roles included Antonida in Glinka’s Ivan Susanin, Natasha in Dargomyzhskii’s The Mermaid, Kupava in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden, and Tatiana, Liza, and lolantha in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, and lolantha. She also performed in operas of Western European composers and as a chamber concert singer. Deisha-Sionitskaia organized free concerts, called musical exhibitions, which popularized new chamber music works by Russian composers (1907-13). She was one of the organizers and teachers of the Moscow People’s Conservatory (1907-13). From 1921 to 1932 she was a professor at the Moscow Conservatory. She is also the author of Singing and Feeling (1926).