Dear Gentlemen,

In this blog I have tried to assemble a list of prominent Soviet tenors – tenors behind the Iron Curtain – singers the careers of which went largely obscure from the Western public because of the political realities of the era they were part of – realities which dictated the detachment of the Soviet opera from its Western counterpart.
It just so happened that these times were the Golden Era of the Russian Opera, and the voices that were hidden behind the Iron Curtain were of a remarkable quality.
In addition to that, the revival of these voices in the West is also of much interest because of the unique character and the idiosyncratic nature of the Soviet school of operatic singing, which was different from the Western in many aspects.
By “voices behind the Iron Curtain” I mean those artists whose entire career or a significant part of it developed during the most ideologically radical years of the Soviet rule and the Soviet Union’s disconnection from the West, and not those who had already established a name for themselves in an earlier period, or those who have only started their way in Soviet Union’s very last days or are singing well into the present – both are more familiar to the Western public.
In cases of some of the singers the information and the recordings presented here is all that is left of them, and in some cases appears for the first time in the internet, or in English and for the Western public.

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Donat Donatov (1914)






Born in Saint-Peterburg. After the revolution his family immigrated to Riga. His vocal teacher was Vladimir Shetohin-Alvarec, the disciple of Lamperti. In Riga he made his début in the role of German in a private opera troupe.
In 1937 he went to Italy where he is heard by Gigli and studies with Pertile. In 1939 he makes his début on the scene of the Venetian theater La Fenice in “Troubadour”. Alongside with him in this presentation sing both Maria Caniglia and Carlo Tagliabue. In La Fenice he also played Alfredo in “La Traviata”, where his partner was Toti dal Monte.
The beginning of the World War made Donatov stay in Riga instead of going to Italy again. After the occupation of Latvia by German forces he is forcefully sent to work in Germany, where he sings in the opera theaters of Dresden and Konigsberg. Just before the liberation of Latvia he got back and participated in the local resistance to the Germans.
After World War ended, Latvia became a part of USSR, and in 1949-51 Donatov performed in Odessa, being one of the very few artists allowed to sing in Italian. Among his best roles were Jose, Canio, Turiddu, Othello, Rhadames, Duke.
In the 1950-ies Donatov gets back to Saint-Petersburg. For a couple of seasons he appears in Saint-Petersburg Maliy Opera Theater.