Maria Sokil

Maria Sokil (Rudnytsky) (1902–1999) was a famous Ukrainian opera singer.

Sokil was born in the village of Zherebets' (now Kirov) in the Zaporizhia Oblast on October 19, 1902. She studied at the conservatory in Dnipropetrovsk from 1920 to 1925.

She made her opera debut in Kharkiv in 1927 in the role of Marguerite in Gounod's opera Faust and became the prima donna lyric soprano of that opera theater. In 1929, she and bass Ivan Patorzhynsky, representative singer from the Ukraine, went on a concert tour to Germany and Italy.

Maria remained in Kharkiv until 1930; later, she joined the Kiev Opera (1930-1932).

Later, in 1932, Maria Sokil performed at the Lviv Opera and Ballet Theater and, with her husband Antin Rudnytsky (1902-1975) (they married in 1931), toured a number of countries in Eastern and Central Europe for the next several years coming with concerts to the United States and Canada in 1937 and then again in 1938-1939 and then remaining in the United States when World War II started.

She had success with the roles of Desdemona (Verdi's Otello), Mimi (Puccini's La Bohème), Liu (Puccini's Turandot), Elsa (Richard Wagner's Lohengrin), Tatiana (Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin), Lisa (Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades), Odarka (Hulak-Artemovsky's Zaporozhets za Dunayem), and Natalka (Lysenko's Natalka Poltavka).

In 1939, Sokil had the leading role (Odarka) in the motion picture Cossacks in Exile ("Zaporozhets za Dunayem"), made in the United States.

Maria Sokil and her husband subsequently continued their musical activities in several different ways for many years in the United States.

She died on January 20, 1999, in Youngstown, Ohio, at the age of 96.

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