The life of wonderful people. Elena Vasilievna Obraztsova.
The twentieth century will be remembered for two delightful smiles. Yuri Gagarin, as the first person to conquer space, and Elena Obraztsova, a magnificent singer who raised the art of opera to cosmic heights.
But the conquest of the peaks of Olympus, it will be later. In the meantime, three-year-old Lenochka, together with her mother and grandmother, are hiding from the bombing in besieged Leningrad.
People who are frozen on the paths and roads remain in the memory. In the entrances and basements, those who died of hunger.
125 grams of bread on the table and my mother's voice demanding that Lena eat it. And her childish, but firm, judicious refusal: “No, no mommy, if you don’t eat it, you will die. And if you die, I will die too. "
The road of life across Lake Ladoga, when with wide eyes I looked at the cars drowning with people.
In the small town of Ustyuzhna, Vologda Oblast, five-year-old Lena goes to kindergarten, where she immediately surprises the teachers with her voice. But mom just shrugs off the advice. Daughter in the artist, laughter, and nothing more.
In 1946, the Obraztsov family returned to Leningrad, but alas, the apartment was given to other people. They are given only one room in which even the wallpaper is torn off. There remains an unpleasant aftertaste in the soul, when even personal pre-war photographs left in the apartment had to be bought out or exchanged for bread from new residents.
Father is transferred through the service line to Taganrog and there, at the age of nine, little Lena begins to reveal her talent. In 1957, breaking the will of her father, she entered the music school in the city of Rostov-on-Don.
In 1958, Lenochka returned to his hometown and brilliantly held a competition at the Leningrad Conservatory named after N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov.
As a student in 1962, she became the winner of the All-Union Vocal Competition. M.I. Glinka in Moscow and received an invitation to the Bolshoi Theater.
Only now the father agrees with the choice of his daughter and goes to reconciliation.
In 1963, a 24-year-old student with a large theater went on tour. Japan, France, Spain. In Italy, the singer performs at the most famous theater in the world, Milan's La Scala. The young vocalist turns into an opera diva. The whole world begins to talk about her.
She is invited by the best theaters of the planet with the most outstanding singers and brilliant conductors. In Spain, she was declared the best Carmen in the world.
Montserrat Caballe, Spanish opera singer, for the first time hearing Elena Obraztsova's voice for a long time could not come to her senses saying on the sidelines: “Did you hear her? Simply unrealistically fantastic. Rumbling like the ocean, like the waves at high tide. Either a voice bubbling like an incarnate spirit, now a demonically charming voice. He seems to wake up with dew, hopeless, tragic and disappearing like the sun at sunset. "
And after the death of Obraztsova, she added: "The voice that was not there before and will never be gone forever."
