A prominent member of the Belgrade National Opera during the mid-twentienth century, Bugarinović is remembered for her rich, dark voice[1] as well as being the first Serbian woman both to receive a permanent engagement with the Vienna State Opera and to perform at Germany's famous Bayreuth Festival.
She studied voice and piano in Timișoara and there gave birth to her daughter, Mirjana Kalinović-Kalin, who would also become an opera singer.
Only a year after her engagement with the National Theatre, she graduated to leading roles with the part of Azucena from Giuseppe Verdi's Il trovatore.
During this time, she also recorded five roles in Belgrade National Opera's cycle of seven Russian operas for Decca Records—Marina Mnishek (Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov) and Marfa (Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina), both recorded in 1954; and, in 1955, Konchakovna (Alexander Borodin's Prince Igor), the Countess (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades), and Filipjevna (Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin)—and the role of Vanya in Mikhail Glinka's A Life for the Tsar for EMI Records in 1957.
An extant recording exists of her assumption of Erda, Grimgerde, and the Second Norn from a 1952 performance of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen under conductor Joseph Keilberth.