Czapska, Adelina (EN)

Czapska Adelina, full name A. Korytko-Czapska, *16 December 1891 Smoleńsk, †13 July 1985 Montreal, Polish singer (soprano). She came from a noble family that had been settled in Ukraine since the 16th century. Between 1911 and 1918, she studied singing with N. Irecka at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, and later worked under the guidance of I. Yershov. She was noted for her musicality, her resonant voice (a lyric-coloratura soprano) and her acting skills. In 1918, she made her debut at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg in the role of Marguerite in Ch. Gounod’s Faust. From 1921, she lived in Warsaw with her husband Bronisław Czapski, where she was engaged by E. Młynarski for the opera, making her debut in the title role of Żeleński’s Goplana. By 1930, she had performed over 30 roles on that stage, including being the first to sing the leading female roles in L. Różycki’s Casanova and Beatrix Cenci, T. Joteyko’s Zygmunt August, and P. Rytel’s Ijola. She also sang the roles of Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust, Queen Marguerite in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, Leonora in Verdi’s Il Trovatore and Elza in Wagner’s Lohengrin. After 1930, she moved to Vienna, then toured South America, and in 1933 sang at the opera in Berlin. The outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 found Czapska in Paris, from where she travelled to the United States and then to Canada, where she settled permanently in 1941. She opened a singing school in Montreal and ran the Opéra des Jeunes ensemble; at the French University of Montreal, she gave lectures on the culture of Slavic countries. She left behind several hundred pages of memoirs, collected by her son Leon Czapski, which remain unpublished to this day.