Boris Sobinov

Boris Sobinov

Boris Leonidovich Sobinov (Russian: Бори́с Леони́дович Со́бинов, 1895, Moscow – 1956, Klin) was a Russian composer and a son of Leonid Sobinov, Russia's leading lyric tenor during the first quarter of the 20th Century.

Boris was the first child born to Maria Karzhavina, a dramatic actress and Leonid Sobinov, a famous opera singer, who had met as schoolmates at the Philharmonic Society. Though their union dissolved after only a few years, Leonid remained an active and loving presence in the lives of Boris and younger brother Yuri (1897-1920).

Boris received a military education while obtaining musical training. His younger brother Yuri (1897–1920) was a visual artist and painted the pictured oil portrait of Boris at the piano (1910).

Both brothers served in the tsarist army, and then in the White Army in the Civil War. Yuri was killed near Melitopol. Boris, along with army baron Pyotr Wrangel, managed to escape to Germany. He later graduated from Berlin's High Art School, where he later taught. Throughout his professorial years he continued to compose his own works.

Leonid and Boris reunited as Leonid toured Berlin. In 1931 Boris settled in Riga, where Leonid spent much of a one year sabbatical with his son, second wife Nina Mukina and daughter Svetlana. Eventually father and son toured Europe together, giving concerts in Finland, Estonia, Poland, the Balkans, Germany, and France. Preserved programs of these concerts are on display in Russia's Yaroslavl museum.

In 1945, when the Soviet troops entered into Berlin, Boris Leonidovich greeted victory with enthusiasm. At that time he lived in the American zone of Berlin and was invited to give a concert for Russian troops. But instead he was abducted by the NKVD, brought to the airport, and sent to Minsk. He was convicted and spent 10 years in the prisons and labour camps of the GULAG. He was rehabilitated in 1955, but with a "wolf ticket" that means an internal exile without the right to settle closer than 100 km from large urban centers.

During the last year of his life he lived in Klin at the Tchaikovsky's House-Museum, where Yuri Lvovich Davydov (the nephew of Pyotr Tchaikovsky) and his daughters Irina and Xenia gave him a refuge. Boris occasionally secretly visited the house of his father in Moscow and his dacha in Peredelkino. Boris Sobinov died in 1956 of cancer.