Elena Kruglikova

Born June 3 (16), 1907, in PodoPsk, in present-day Moscow Oblast. Soviet Russian soprano. People’s artist of the RSFSR (1947).

Kruglikova graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1933 in the singing class of K. N. Dorliak. She was a solist with the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow between 1932 and 1956. Kruglikova’s lyric and dramatic soprano voice is sonorous and warm, well trained for the stage. She has given sincere renditions of such classical Russian roles as Tatiana and Oksana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Cherevichki and Fevronia and Vera Sheloga in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh and Vera Sheloga. She sang the first performance of the role of Lushka in Dzerzhinskii’s opera Virgin Soil Upturned (1937). Kruglikova also performed successfully in operas by Western European composers—for example, as Mathilde in William Tell by Rossini (State Prize of the USSR, 1942).

She toured Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Kruglikova began teaching at the Moscow Conservatory in 1963. She was awarded two orders and medals.