Fyodor Petrovich Komissarzhevsky

Komissarzhevsky was born near Kyiv and after studying law at St. Petersburg University worked in the Russian Department of Taxation.

However, after three years and against the wishes of his father, he gave up his career as a lawyer to study singing in Italy with Pietro Repetto.

[3] He then sang, under the name "Teodoro di Pietro",[4][5] in Milan, Rome, Florence and Genoa, as well as in Odessa, Madrid, Barcelona, and even Rio de Janeiro.

[4] When Stanislavski founded the Society of Art and Literature in 1888, Komissarzhevsky became the first head of the operatic and musical section of its school.

[7] He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome where the inscription on his gravestone reads: "Teodoro Komisarjevsky di Pietro, artist of the Italian opera and the Imperial Opera of St. Petersburg, professor at the Moscow Conservatory, and a soldier in Garibaldi's legions, died on the soil of his beloved Italy.

"[5]Komissarzhevsky's first wife was Mariya Nikolaevna Shulgina, the daughter of General Nikolai Shulgin, a war hero and officer in the Preobrazhensky regiment.

The couple met when Mariya Nikolaevna took singing lessons from Komissarzhevsky and married despite her father's opposition.

Fyodor's younger brother Nikolai, who became a writer, remained in Russia and was executed during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge in 1938.

By the late 1880s Komissarzhevsky's second marriage had also foundered, and he was to spend the rest of his life essentially alone, although he frequently corresponded with his first wife and with his daughter Vera, who would also visit him as much as she could.