Никола Гюзелев

Before he sang a note on a public stage, Nicola Ghiuselev trained as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, and the eye he acquired there stayed in the physical detail of his characterisations. Born in Pavlikeni in 1936, he studied voice with Tsvetana Sabeva, Iliya Yosifov and then Hristo Brambarov, joined the National Opera in Sofia as a trainee in 1960 and first appeared as Timur in Turandot; his Philip II took first prize and a gold medal at the international competition for young opera singers in Sofia in 1963. The Metropolitan heard him as Ramfis in 1965, Parma as Attila in 1968, and from there the career ran through La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Covent Garden, the Paris Opera, the Bolshoi and the Teatro Colón. Boris Godunov, Philip II, the Grand Inquisitor, Attila, Zaccaria, Fiesco, Don Basilio and Mephistopheles stood at the centre of the repertoire, and he can be heard on Decca's La Gioconda and Les Huguenots. He taught, and directed the Boris Christoff Bulgarian Academy in Rome. A mountain in Antarctica carries his name. He died in 2014. He took his degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1960, the year he entered the opera house, and Gremin in Eugene Onegin belonged to his Russian roles. He ran the Rome academy between 1994 and 1996.