Zinaida Jurjewskaja

Zinaida Jurjewskaja was an Estonian-born German operatic soprano singer. Alternative spellings of her surname found in sources include Jurjevskaja, Jurievskaia Yurievskaja and Yuryevskaja. She adopted this as her stage name as a tribute to her birthplace. Zinaida Lenkina was born in Tartu, Estonia, on 19 June 1892. She was an intelligent child, speaking Estonian, German and Russian, and started to play the piano at the age of six. She graduated from the Tartu Puškin Girls' Gymnasium aged 15. She began studying in the history-philology department of the Tartu Higher Women's Course, but in 1912 moved to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to study singing with Alma Fohström. She had met guards officer Georg von Brehmer at Kuressaare in 1908, and met him again in St Petersburg. They married in 1918, the year in which she graduated from the conservatory. She had a successful singing career in Estonia and then moved to the Berlin Opera House. Her first performance there, in 1922, was in Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel, and in 1924 she took the title role in the first Berlin performance of Janáček's Jenůfa. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinaida...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)