Boris Goldovsky
Boris Goldovsky was a notable figure in the world of opera and music education, born on June 7, 1908, in Moscow into a musical Jewish family. His early life was marked by a transition from wealth to hardship following the Russian Revolution, leading him to accompany his mother, a violinist, on concert tours. Goldovsky's musical education included studies under prominent teachers such as Artur Schnabel and Ernő Dohnányi, and he eventually emigrated to the United States in 1930. Initially uninterested in opera, his perspective changed after an insightful rehearsal, which ignited a passion for the dramatic potential of the art form.
Throughout his career, Goldovsky held significant positions, including directing the opera department at the Cleveland Institute of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music. He was instrumental in the development of opera education in the U.S. and founded the New England Opera Theater, which aimed to train young singers. Goldovsky also gained fame as a radio commentator for the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, where he educated audiences about opera through engaging discussions. He authored influential works on opera and continued to teach until his retirement in the mid-1980s. Goldovsky passed away on February 15, 2001, leaving a lasting impact on opera education and appreciation in America.
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Boris Goldovsky
Russian-born musician
- Born: June 7, 1908
- Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
- Died: February 15, 2001
- Place of death: Brookline, Massachusetts
Pianist, conductor, producer, educator, and radio lecturer, Goldovsky played a major role in introducing and promoting opera in the United States.
Early Life
Boris Goldovsky (BOH-rihs goh-DOHLF-skee) was born in Moscow on June 7, 1908, into a prosperous musical Jewish family. His father was a lawyer; his mother was the prominent violinst Lea Luboschutz. When it was discovered that he had no interest in the violin, he was given piano lessons and later received four years of more rigorous training with the German teacher Karl Augustovich Kipp.
The family lost their wealth with the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and to earn money Goldovsky became his mother’s accompanist. After the Communist takeover, Goldovsky and his mother traveled to Berlin on a concert tour in September, 1921, with the understanding that his father and family would join them. Meanwhile, his father died, and Goldovsky and his mother never returned to the Soviet Union. Goldovsky studied with a fellow Russian immigrant Leonid Kreutzer and later with Artur Schnabel.
After a year in Paris, where he had traveled to accompany his mother, in 1924 his mother left for the United States to pursue her violin career and Goldovsky returned to Berlin to continue studying with Schnabel. After a brief trip to the United States to accompany his mother, Goldovsky returned to Europe to study piano with Ernő Dohnányi in Budapest.
Goldovsky’s mother accepted a teaching position at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 1927. After graduating from the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest in 1930, Goldovsky emigrated to the United States and joined his mother in Philadelphia. The results of his years in Europe were fluency in several languages and a thorough musical training. At the Curtis Institute, Goldovsky studied conducting under Fritz Reiner, from whom he received his first training in opera. Goldovsky initially disliked opera, but it was while coaching a student rehearsal of act 1 of La Bohème (1896) that he realized its potential as a dramatic art form if done properly.
At Curtis, Goldovsky met and married a fellow student, the soprano Margaret Codd, who had a career in opera. After he and Codd graduated in 1934, Goldovsky became Reiner’s assistant and vocal coach, helping him to prepare operas for the Philadelphia Grand Opera Association.
Life’s Work
When Artur Rodzinski began an opera season with the Cleveland Orchestra in 1936, Goldovsky was hired to help prepare the productions (while also assisting Reiner in Philadelphia). On the basis of his growing reputation for coaching opera, he was invited to begin an opera department at the Cleveland Institute of Music for the fall of 1936. He accepted, but, despairing at how little he knew about stage directing, he studied opera dramatics over the summer with Ernst Lert, to whom Goldovsky attributed his credo that opera singers must express the dramatic meaning of music in a seemingly spontaneous manner through their motions, gestures, and expressions. Singers must understand the dramatic and psychological motivation for every phrase they sing. Opera, like good theater, must make dramatic sense. Scenery, costumes, lights, and instrumental passages also must contribute to the dramatic whole. The enemies of good opera were those who separated the music from the drama. Goldovsky, who had previously maintained he had no interest in opera partly because it lacked the dramatic intensity of theater, suddenly found opera to be his life mission.
When Serge Koussevitzky founded the summer Berkshire Music Festival, at Tanglewood in Massachusetts, in 1940, Goldovsky became the musical assistant for the opera department. In the informal, experimental atmosphere, Goldovsky was given free rein to coach singers and present productions, many of them world premieres. He held this post until 1962. The names of the singers who passed through Tanglewood read like a Hall of Fame of American opera.
On the basis of his work at Tanglewood, he was invited in 1942 to become the director of the opera department at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. When New York’s Metropolitan Opera toured to Boston in 1944, Goldovsky was the local member of the Saturday afternoon radio intermission opera quiz. His vast knowledge of opera prompted the Texaco company to offer him the post of intermission host for the Texaco-sponsored Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.
These talks, heard nationwide, did much to educate Americans about opera. Avoiding too much technical language and plot summary, Goldovsky focused instead on musical and dramatic analysis of the opera of the day, with illustrations played at the piano. Selected talks have been published in Accents on Opera (1953) and Good Afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen! (1984).
In 1946, he founded the New England Opera Theater at the New England Conservatory. The company became independent when Goldovsky took it to New York in the 1950’s, where it was known as the Goldovsky Opera Theater. The opera company’s main mission was training young singers for careers in opera. For four decades the company toured the United States and Canada. The fruits of Goldovsky’s many years of teaching are contained in two books, Bringing Opera to Life (1968) and Bringing Soprano Arias to Life (1973).
Goldovsky returned to the Curtis Institute to teach in the later 1970’s. In 1985, he retired from Curtis and disbanded the Goldovsky Opera Theater. He died after a long illness at age ninety-two in Brookline, Massachusetts, on February 15, 2001.
Significance
Through the educational opera programs he established, his touring opera company, and his fifty-year series of Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts, Goldovsky was a significant teacher, promoter, and popularizer of opera in America.
Bibliography
Goldovsky, Boris. Accents on Opera. New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1953. Essays on aspects of individual operas adapted from Goldovsky’s Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Bringing Opera to Life: Operatic Acting and Stage Direction. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1968. A handbook for operatic training of the student, covering the language of the theater, staging, creating a character, choruses, and ensembles.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Good Afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen! Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. A collection of Goldovsky’s Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast scripts from the 1960’s to 1980’s.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. My Road to Opera: The Recollections of Boris Goldovsky. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Goldovsky’s memoirs of his life in opera up to 1951; contains memoirs of the greats of American musical life, including Reiner, Josef Hofmann, and Koussevitzky.
Goldovsky, Boris, and Arthur Schoep. Bringing Soprano Arias to Life. New York: G. Schirmer, 1973. Discusses the vocal and musical aspects, dramatic situation, and character motivation needed for performance of famous arias.
Tommasini, Anthony. “Boris Goldovsky, Ninety-Two, Musician and Opera’s Avid Evangelist.” The New York Times, February 18, 2001. Obituary giving a summary of Goldovsky’s life and achievements.