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Boris Goldovsky (; Russian: Борис Анисимович Голдовский; June 7, 1908 – February 15, 2001) was a Russian-born conductor and broadcast commentator, active in the United States. He has been called an important "popularizer" of opera in America."American Aria" by Sherrill Milnes As an opera producer, conductor, impresario, and broadcaster, he was prominent within the American operatic community between 1946 and 1985.
In January 1945, Goldovsky began the New England Opera Theater (later known as the "Goldovsky Opera Theater") under the sponsorship of the New England Conservatory.Bruce Macpherson and James Klein, Measure by Measure, Boston: NEC Trustees, 1995, p102 The operation became independent and moved to New York in the 1950s and enjoyed four decades of touring during which young singers were trained for operatic careers. Many of them went on to sing at the Metropolitan Opera and other leading houses. He disbanded the company upon his retirement in 1985. He also joined the faculty of the Southwestern Opera Institute in the mid-1970s and worked there for ten years. During this institute, he worked with dozens of students from universities in the United States at the University of Southwestern Louisiana (now University of Louisiana, Lafayette). Invited by his former student Beaman Griffin, he was joined by his friends Richard Crittenden and Arthur Schoep. Scenes were all performed in English so singers would learn to "react as well as act."
During the New York Metropolitan Opera's tour visit to Boston in around 1946, Goldovsky participated in a promotional opera quiz event. His encyclopedic knowledge led Texaco to offer him a weekend job as master of ceremonies covering the intermission periods of the Texaco-sponsored Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. The sponsor agreed to pay for weekly travel to New York. He quickly became known across the United States for his Saturday radio commentary and earned the nickname of "Mr. Opera."
In 1953 he wrote Accents on Opera, a series of essays, sponsored by the Metropolitan Opera Guild and published in New York by Farrar, Straus & Young. In 1954 he received a Peabody Award for Outstanding Contribution to Radio Music. Peabody Award – 1954 He also wrote a guide for sopranos who "often receive very little instruction when staging arias at small companies" entitled "Bringing Soprano Arias to Life." His most popular book, My Road to Opera, is an anecdote-filled autobiography.
In the late 1970s, he began again to teach at the Curtis Institute, from where he retired in 1985. He left an extensive collection of Mozart memorabilia to the Curtis Institute upon his death.
He has been credited in several recordings, including a Boston Symphony Orchestra recording of Wagner's "Lohengrin", conducted by Erich Leinsdorf. Famous associates include Mario Lanza, Leonard Bernstein and Mary Beth Peil.
He died in Brookline, Massachusetts, aged 92, in 2001.
As a competition-level chess player, Mr. Goldovsky began by dividing the stage into a grid of 18 squares. The production mechanism involved typewriters and photocopy machines: preserving enough of the score to present the vocal lines with space between systems to clarify stage directions.
With the charts, assistant directors could prepare ensembles by teaching the singers the stage action (“blocking”) exactly as Mr. Goldovsky envisioned it, after which he could work with the singers for final improvements, or directly present the scenes in recitals.
At numerous opera workshops (“Oglebay” in Oglebay Park, West Virginia, being the first among them), staff directors would prepare scenes - some would be seen by the workshop director in rehearsal, though most would be presented directly. As Mr. Goldovsky retired, the scenes would be presented directly by the various directors.
Stage directors had their individual touches (“dirty thumbprints” was one fond description), and there would be lively discussions on exactly which detail was preferable.
These documented charts were not widely distributed: while the shorthand is discussed in Bringing Opera to Life and Bringing Soprano Arias to Life, the charts themselves are not mentioned. However discreetly they were handled, they are clearly the result of substantial labor: after defining precise stage directions, they required photocopying the piano-vocal scores, cutting the copies into systems, pasting them onto typewritten pages with the instructions interposed, and finally, copied again.
As of November 2020, The Robinson Music Library of the Cleveland Institute of Music has nine volumes of charts on permanent reserve with call number Ref. MT 955.G56g.
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