Mark Osipovich Reizen (1895-1992) was a leading Soviet-era opera singer with a beautiful and expansive bass voice. Reizen was born into a Jewish family of mine workers in 1895. He had four brothers and a sister, and all were musically trained, playing mandolin, guitar, balalaika and accordion. He served as a soldier in the First World War. Then he studied as an engineer, but also as a singer at the Kharkiv conservatory with the Italian professor Federico Bugamelli in 1919-1920. He made his debut at the Kharkiv Opera in 1921 as Pimen in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, and in 1925 moved to the Mariinsky Theatre in Leningrad. Reizen toured Paris, Berlin, Monte Carlo and London in 1929-1930. A tall man commanding a strong stage presence, he joined the Bolshoi Theatre in 1930, remaining there as a principal bass until his retirement in 1954. Among his roles were: Ivan Susanin and Ruslan from the Glinka's operas, Don Basilio (The Barber of Seville by Rossini), Mephistopheles (Faust by Gounod), Prince Gremin (Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky), Salieri (Mozart and Salieri), the Viking merchant (Sadko) in operas by Rimsky-Korsakov, the old Gypsy (Aleko by Rachmaninov), Wotan in Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungs, Konchak (Prince Igor by Borodin), Philip II and Procida in Verdi's operas, and so on. He became a particularly memorable interpreter of Boris and Dosifei in the operas by Mussorgsky. Reizen was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1941, 1949 and 1951. In 1967 he began teaching, and became a prof

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