Ukrainian opera singer, tenor. He sang in the opera houses of Italy, France, Switzerland, Great Britain.
Biography
Mykola Karbachenskyi was born on October 22, 1810 in a peasant family with many children in the village of Voronezh, Sumy Oblast. He received the beginnings of his vocal and choral education at the famous Glukhiv singing school, from there he was selected as a bearer of bright vocal data, and forcibly taken (no later than 1820) to the Imperial Court Singing Chapel, which at that time was directed by a famous native of Karbachenskyi, the brilliant Dmytro Bortnyanskyi. As you know, during the time of the leadership of the chapel Dmytro Bortnyanskyi, its composition was almost Ukrainians themselves, because it was the Ukrainian land that was known throughout the empire for its incomparable singing voices. In March 1826, a new director was appointed to manage the chapel - F. P. Lviv, the author of poetic and prose works, an amateur singer, who had previously known the poets H. Derzhavin and V. Kapnist. Little has changed in the training and work of singers compared to the past. Mykola Karbachensky continued to sing at church services and concerts open to the public. At this time, he is entrusted with solo parts. The first documentary evidence of his performances in this role is reproduced in the letter of F. P. Lviv dated December 30, 1827 to the minister of the court of Prince P. M. Volkonsky, in which he expressed a request for the encouragement of the three best singers of the chapel, including Mykola, who: "not only in the exceptionality of their voices, but also in their knowledge and ability to sing are not inferior to Italian singers." The request was granted: the young men each received 200 rubles in allowances.
During this period, the imperial court spared no expense in educating the most talented youth in the most prestigious educational institutions in Europe in order to raise the level of culture, art, and science in the empire. Thanks to his exceptional singing talent, Mykola Karbachensky was lucky enough to be among the cohort of selected Ukrainians who were sent to study in Europe at state expense. In 1830, at the age of 20, Karbachensky was sent to study in Italy under the tutelage of the composer and vocal teacher Mykhailo Hlinka. At the same time, with the light hand of an official of the imperial chancellery, the difficult-to-pronounce surname Karbachensky was transformed into the surname Ivanov.
In Italy, Mykola, already Ivanov, got to study with one of the most famous Italian singers and vocal teachers of that time, Eliodoro Bianchi, who conducted his vocal-pedagogical practice in Milan. According to Bianchi Mykoli, who possessed a rare type of the highest sounding male voice — a counter-tenor and a timbre with colors from metallic shine to the finest tones of velvet shades, after the completion of the vocal training, he will be able to perform any opera-tenor repertoire on the most prestigious opera stages of the world. And this prediction came true after three years of improving the singing technique in the classes of such famous teachers as Josephine Fodor-Manviel and Henryk Panofka. As early as 1832, Mykola Ivanov was commissioned to perform the solo part in Giovanni Pacinni's cantata Faithful Name. The brilliance and breadth of the singer's range during his performance in this opera impressed even the most discerning connoisseurs of singing. As a result, the still completely unknown singer is offered a career-breaking offer - a debut on the stage of the Neapolitan "San Carlo", one of the most prestigious opera houses in Europe, in the role of Richard Percy in the opera "Anna Boleyn" by Gaetano Donizetti.
When Mykola Ivanov unexpectedly receives a demand for an immediate return to Russia, he decides to stay in Italy forever, inventing various reasons for the impossibility of returning (the need for treatment for an infectious and incurable disease, etc.).
Mykola Ivanov's triumphant debut opened the door to the stages of the most prestigious theaters in Europe - in Paris and London, Naples and Milan, Venice and Genoa, Bologna and Rome, Marseille and Vienna, Palermo and Turin, Florence and Trieste, etc. The best Italian singers of the "golden age of bel canto" Giovanni Rubini, Antonio Tamburini, Enrico Tamburlica, Polina Viardo-Garcia performed with him in the ensemble, as well as artists and musicians from Austria, England, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Hungary, France, the Czech Republic, and Sweden.
The most outstanding creators of music of the 19th century befriended and collaborated with Mykola Ivanov. — Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, Giuseppe Verdi and Gioacchino Rossini. Mykola Ivanov's creative surge was the part of Arnold in Gioacchino Rossini's opera "Wilhelm Tell". During the opera, the composer was in the theater hall, who from the moment he heard the singer's voice for the first time, did not let him out of his attention for a moment, writing his new operas based on his vocal data. Giuseppe Verdi, having heard the Ukrainian in the main role in the opera "Ernani" for the first time, wrote a stand specifically for his performance well, the aria “Odi il voto grande iddio.” And Verdi could not imagine staging his opera “Attila” in Trieste, and later in Turin, without the participation of Mykola Ivanov.
In the period from 1833 to 1837, Mykola Ivanov — prosoloist of the London Royal Opera "Covent Garden". The singer's art reaches such publicity and recognition that he is granted English citizenship by the supreme command of the Queen of Great Britain.
Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the leaders of the Italian national liberation movement and the international union of democrats "Young Europe" (Italian: "Giovine Europa"), named Mykola in the essay "Philosophy of Music" among those who already demonstrated on the theater stage the idea of "social art", the mission of music in the "religious and patriotic education of the human masses."
Mykola Karbachenskyi-Ivanov devoted twenty years of his creative life to the opera scene of Europe and thus, during his lifetime, turned his name into a true living legend. He always called Ukraine his homeland, and in theaters the audience greeted him as a "Cossack singer", "born under the Cossack sky". Throughout his life, having mastered leading European languages, the singer did not speak Russian. The great singer did not stop thinking, singing and even communicating in his native Ukrainian when such an opportunity arose. The great singer spent the rest of his days in his own house in Bologna, where he liked to hang out in the garden, constantly humming songs about himself that he remembered from his childhood. Once upon a time, the great French composer Hector Berlioz, having visited him and heard for the first time in his life in a live performance by the singer precisely these Ukrainian folk songs that he constantly sang, remained very moved and for a long time after these visits did not lose faith that somewhere on the globe, apart from Italy, such a musically gifted people could live.
Mykola Karbachenskyi-Ivanov died in Bologna on July 19, 1880 at the age of 69.
