Raina Kabaivanska

At the Bulgarian National Opera in 1957 she sang Tatyana in Eugene Onegin; a year later she was in Italy, studying with Zita Fumagalli-Riva and Giulia Tess, and in 1961 she made her La Scala debut as Agnese in Beatrice di Tenda. Covent Garden and the Metropolitan Opera followed in 1962, with Desdemona and Nedda. Born in Burgas in 1934 and trained in Sofia as both singer and pianist, Raina Kabaivanska built a repertoire running from Gluck and Donizetti to Janáček and Richard Strauss but settling at its centre on Verdi and Puccini — Violetta, Elisabetta, Leonora, Mimì, Manon Lescaut, Adriana Lecouvreur, Francesca da Rimini, and above all Tosca and Cio-Cio-San, the two roles by which she is still identified in the Italian theatres that were her professional home. Teaching became the second career: the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, the Vecchi-Tonelli institute in Modena, the Accademia d'Arte Lirica at Osimo, and from 2001 the international master class established in her name at New Bulgarian University in Sofia, which by its twenty-fifth edition in 2025 was drawing candidates from thirty countries. The gala concerts of that class have for many years been conducted by Nayden Todorov. She sang with Franco Corelli, Mario del Monaco, Jon Vickers, Carlo Bergonzi, Alfredo Kraus, Plácido Domingo, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti, and gave Tosca and Cio-Cio-San more than four hundred times between them. The prizes run from the Bellini in 1965 and the Viotti d'Oro in 1970 to the Venice Grand Prix for a life devoted to music in 2000, the rank of Commandeur in the French Order of Arts and Letters in 2011 and an opera Oscar for lifetime achievement in 2013; in 2002 she established a fund at New Bulgarian University to provide scholarships for young singers.