Great Russian opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya passed away on Tuesday at the age of 86, the Vishnevskaya's Opera Center press service reports.

      Born in 1926, Vishnevskaya began her opera career in the Leningrad (former St. Petersburg) Region opera and ballet theater in 1944, and then joined the Bolshoi Theater of Moscow. She soon gained a great success and global recognition, as well as her husband, renowned conductor and cello player Mstislav Rostropovich.

      The married couple, who were together for 51 years until Rostripovich's death in 2007, had started their foreign careers after being expelled from the Soviet Union for supporting dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1974. Only in 1990 they were allowed to return to their homeland.

      In 2002, Vishnevskaya became head of a newly built Opera Center in downtown Moscow. Since 2006, she had chaired the jury of a singing competition named in her honor: the Vishnevskaya Open International Competition of Opera Singers.

Galina Vishnevskaya "Aida" G. Verdi