Portrait of A. L. Andreyeva von Skilondz

In 1910 the soprano Adelaida Andreyeva von Skilondz was about to leave almost everything she had in St Petersburg. A year earlier she had sung the Queen of Shemakha when The Golden Cockerel, Rimsky-Korsakov's last opera, was first staged in the city. In 1910 she left her husband, a government official, and her Russian career, and went to Germany, where she won a contract at the Berlin court opera. Ilya Repin's portrait of her carries that same date, and the image you see here comes from an old black-and-white book reproduction captioned 1910. He painted her three times in all, and the friendship outlasted the move. In 1927, long settled in Stockholm after years at the Royal Swedish Opera, she came to see Repin at Penaty, his house in Kuokkala, which by then lay in Finland. His next letter to her opened with the words, it was a dream.