Pavel Bulakhov

Pavel Bulakhov was the younger son of a musical family: his father and his elder brother, the composer Pyotr Bulakhov, were both tenors, and his niece Yevgeniya Zbruyeva became the leading contralto of her day. Trained at the St Petersburg Theatre School, he sang at the Imperial Opera there for more than twenty years, in a career that took in the spoken theatre as well as opera. His graceful lyric tenor suited Almaviva, Rimbaud in Robert le diable and Finn in Ruslan and Lyudmila. In 1856 he created the Prince in Dargomizhsky's Rusalka, opposite his wife Anisya Bulakhova as Natasha.