Donets-Tesseir, Mariia

Donets-Tesseir, Mariia [Донець-Тессейр, Марія; Dontec'-Tessejr, Marija], b 4 May 1889 in Kyiv, d 15 December 1974 in Kyiv. Singer (soprano), pedagogue; wife of Mykhailo Donets. She studied in Kyiv and Warsaw (under Oleksander Myshuha) and then at the Vienna and Milan conservatories. In 1915–22 and 1927–48 she was a soloist with the Kyiv Theater of Opera and Ballet; in 1923–4, with the Kharkiv Opera (see Kharkiv Theater of Opera and Ballet); and in 1924–5, with the Sverdlovsk Opera. She appeared on stage in the roles of Oksana in Semen Hulak-Artemovsky’s Zaporozhets' za Dunaiem (Zaporozhian Cossack beyond the Danube), Princess Swan in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tsar Saltan, and Violetta and Gilda in Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata and Rigoletto. She began lecturing at the Kyiv Conservatory in 1935 and in 1953 was promoted to the rank of professor at the conservatory. Her works deal with the methodology of teaching singing.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 1 (1984).]