Vasilii Rodionovich Petrov

Born Feb. 28 (Mar. 12), 1875, in the village of Alekseevka, in present-day Kharkov Oblast; died May 4, 1937, in Moscow. Soviet Russian bass. People’s Artist of the Republic (1933).

In 1902, Petrov graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, where he had studied voice with A. I. Bartsal. From 1902 to 1937 he was a soloist at the Bolshoi Theater. Petrov’s flexible and expressive voice had a wide range, which combined power and mellifluous sound with a coloratura technique, rare in a bass. His best roles were Susanin and Ruslan in Glinka’s Ivan Susanin and Ruslan and Liudmila, Dositheus in Mussorgsky’s Khovan-shchina, the Miller in Dargomyzhskii’s The Mermaid, and Me-phistopheles in Gounod’s Faust.

Petrov often appeared in concert. He also toured abroad. He was the director of voice at the Stanislavsky Theater of Opera from 1925 to 1929 and at the Opera Studio of the Bolshoi Theater from 1935 to 1937. During the last years of his life, Petrov taught at the Glazunov Music School in Moscow.