Mykysha, Mykhailo

Mykysha, Mykhailo [Микиша, Михайло; Mykyša, Myxajlo], b 6 June 1885 in Myrhorod, Poltava gubernia, d 20 November 1971 in Kyiv. Opera and concert singer (heroic tenor); father of Taras Mykysha. He studied at the Lysenko Music and Drama School in the class of Oleksander Myshuha. In 1910 he joined Sadovsky's Theater, and in subsequent years he was a soloist of the Kyiv Theater of Opera and Ballet (1914–22), the Bolshoi Theater, and the Kharkiv Theater of Opera and Ballet (1932–4). He taught at Kharkiv Conservatory (from 1937) and Kyiv Conservatory (from 1944). His better-known opera roles include Vakula in Peter Tchaikovsky’s Cherevichki (Little Shoes) and Hermann in his The Queen of Spades, Herod in Richard Strauss’s Salome, and Raoul de Nangis in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. He was also an outstanding performer of Ukrainian folk songs and popular songs. He compiled the methodological study Praktychni osnovy vokal'noho mystetstva (Practical Bases of Vocal Art) as retold and edited by M. Holovashchenko (Kyiv 1971). Mykysha’s biography, by M. Sheliubsky, was published in Kyiv in 1947.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]