Galina Vishnevskaya.

Galina Pavlovna Ivanova was born on October 25, 1926 in Leningrad. Abandoned by her parents during Stalin’s dictatorship, she was raised by her grandmother. During World War II, at age 16, she refused to evacuate from besieged Leningrad and joined the defense, earning the Medal for Defense of Leningrad in 1943 at age 17.

Vishnevskaya made her professional debut in 1944 in Leningrad with an operetta company led by Mark Rubin. In 1952, she joined the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, where she became a leading soprano. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1961 as Aida, and her La Scala debut in 1964 as Liu in Turandot opposite Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli. In 2002, she opened the Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Centre in Moscow.

Vishnevskaya married naval officer Georgi Vishnevsky at age 18, but he objected to her opera career and they divorced. She then married Mark Rubin, with whom she had a son who died in infancy in 1945. In 1955, she married cellist Mstislav Rostropovich; they had two daughters: Olga, born in 1956, and Elena, born in 1958. In 1974, they fled the Soviet Union after protecting dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They lived in Washington, D.C., where Rostropovich was music director of the National Symphony Orchestra from 1977 to 1994.

Vishnevskaya earned the Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1983 and the People’s Artist of the USSR title in 1963. She appeared in films including Eugene Onegin 1959 and Alexandra 2007. The Medal for Defense of Leningrad remained her most valued award, earned during the Siege of Leningrad in 1943.