Ivan Jadan´s Story
1900-1995

Who is Ivan Jadan, and if he is the Great Russian Tenor of this Century why is he so little known?

Not many tenors or ordinary people celebrate life at 94 years.  But Ivan Jadan at 94 still joyfully sang and gave his friends grounds for singing his praises as an artist and as a human being in love with life.

Ivan Danilovich Jadan was born September 22, 1900, in Lugansk, Russia, At age two, his father playfully dunked him like a donut in a lake near their home.  Jadan always loved being in the water.  He enjoyed swimming daily on the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands where he and his American wife Doris have lived since 1955.

A carefully documented story about Ivan Jadan appeared August 3, 1994, in Moscow´s leading newspaper, TRUD, describing Jadan´s unjust fate as an outcast in Russia ever since his escape from Stalin in 1941.

A 28 track CD of Jadan´s recordings from 1929 to 1955 was released.  For the first time, music lovers in Russia and the U.S. could discover Ivan Jadan.  Ron Della Chiesa of WGBH public radio in Boston calls this Jadan CD "a magnificent recording."

Jadan´s singing career began at age ten when Ivan was alto soloist in the Russian Orthodox Church in the village of Kuppanoy.  Boy altos, not boy sopranos, became tenors.  In Kuppanoy, Ivan, whose parents had separated, lived with his uncle, aunt, and his grandfather who was a blacksmith.  Young Ivan became an able apprentice blacksmith, a skill which served him well later in Moscow, and later still when he moved to St. John.

At age 23 in 1923, Ivan Jadan went to Moscow. He had already studied and sung in Lugansk with gifted musicians who had fled to Lugansk after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to escape the confusion and near famine in the capital.

On the train to Moscow, Jadan's suitcase, with all he owned in it, was stolen. So he set out to the Moscow Conservatory, wet and shabby, hoping to be heard and accepted as a student. He carried with him a letter to Stalin's friend, Red Army Marshal Voroshilov who was also born in Lugansk, recommending the young tenor. However, Jadan never went to the Marshal because the only help he wanted was the approval of musicians with no political strings to be pulled to help him. The head of the Conservatory at that time was Bolestav Jaworski, who fed him, gave him a pair of galoshes, and started teaching him. Ivan also studied at the Conservatory with Professor Grigor Grigorivich Yegorov whose wife was an able accompanist.

A fellow student suggested that Ivan apply for a job at the new Air Force Academy to earn money to support himself and his family. An instructor was needed to teach working with hot metal. Jadan showed his blacksmith skill in making tools. He was given a job as instructor plus fine English woolen uniforms and a place nearby to live. Among his students were men like Yakovlev and Tupelov who designed planes for World War II. 

Jadan's next step forward was an audition with Constantine Sergeitch Stanislavsky, world-renowned actor and director of his own theater. Stanislavsky heard Jadan sing and was impressed. He told the young singer something that has always been important to him: "You have good diction!"

Ivan as the Holy Fool in Boris Goudonov.

At the Stanislavsky Theater, Jadan's natural instincts for good stage presence blossomed. Roles studied under Stanislavsky included Lenski, the young poet in Tschaikovsky's opera, Eugen Onegin, Vanya in Rimsky-Korsakov's opera, The Tsar's Bride and Rudolfo in Verdi's La Boheme.

In 1927 at age 27, Jadan auditioned for the Bolshoi Theater. He was the only tenor selected for the Bolshoi out of 40 tenors competing that year from all over the Soviet Union.

His first role at the Bolshoi was in Lakme with only a few notes to sing, but a year later in 1928, Jadan was already ranked as Premier Lyric Tenor of the Bolshoi and was later decorated as a Merited Artist of the Soviet Union. Ivan's first major role at the Bolshoi was in Rubenstein's opera, Demon, and it was also the last role he sang at the Bolshoi before his winter escape in 1941. 

Ivan as Tsar Berendey in The Snowmaiden.

Ivan Jadan had the great good fortune to have as his coach and accompanist Matvei Ivanovich Sacharoff, a close friend of Rachmaninoff who had already left the USSR. Matvei Sacharoff was the uncle of the physicist Andre Sacharoff who was brought as a child by his uncle to hear Jadan sing. It was Sacharoff who helped Jadan develop such a great repertoire of Russian art songs, or romanzen, a concert repertoire unequaled by any other Russian tenor of his time. Jadan's sensitive interpretations of these great Russian romanzen call to mind Lotte Lehmann's interpretations of German Lieder.

From 1928 until his escape from the Soviet Union in 1941, Jadan sang not only at the Bolshoi Theater but throughout the Soviet Union in concerts from St. Petersburg to Baku as well as Tashkent, 

Ivan goes to Turkey in 1935.

Samarkand and Vladivostok. In 1935 Jadan was sent along with Shostakovich, violinist David Oistrakh and other star performers to make a good impression on the president of Turkey, Ataturk.  Stalin very much wanted Ataturk in the Soviet orbit, but Ataturk's foreign minister Ismet Inonu said Turkey would wait a bit to see how the Soviet experiment worked out. Ataturk, however, loved hearing the Russian artists, especially Ivan Jadan who had his same prominent eyebrows. Ataturk put his arm around Jadan and explained he was adopting him as his son. He then presented Jadan with his personal monogrammed gold cigarette case. Jadan at first declined, saying through an interpreter, "I don't smoke." Ataturk said, "That is fine, but take the cigarette case," which Jadan did. Ataturk then predicted, "One day not one land but the whole world will hear you sing," a prediction at last coming true 60 years later with the release of a 28-track compact disc of Ivan Jadan, Great Russian Tenor of the Century. Jadan never lost the gold cigarette case, a treasured talisman. Jadan, like his fellow artists, was deeply impressed by the personal freedom Turks enjoyed and by the abundance of material things, everything from fine clothing to a strange fruit called grapefruit.

Ivan backstage in Riga as the Duke in Rigoletto.

Jadan's second view of an outside world where people were free came when he was invited in 1937 to Riga, Latvia, on the 100th anniversary of Pushkin's death. (Pushkin had provided the text for such great Russian operas as Tschaikovsky's Eugen Onegin.) As had been the case when Stalin authorized his visit to Turkey, Jadan's wife and two sons served as hostages to insure his return to Moscow. Jadan's performances in opera and concert in Riga were smash hits. When he sang Lenski in Eugen Onegin, audiences demanded he sing the arias two or three times. The same was true when he sang Faust and Rigoletto. Hitting D above high C in Faust three times was accomplished with brilliant ease. To this day, many Latvians now in the U. S. remember the great excitement it brought to all who heard Jadan sing way back in 1937.

Jadan's income and material standard of life were the best. But all around him he saw the misery of the Soviet system. Friends were killed in purges. Food was scarce. Terror and suspicion were constant threats. He had refused to join the Communist Party. By 1941, his name was on the blacklist posted at the theater. Friends were careful not to be seen talking to him. Jadan was a dissident. 

When war broke out between Stalin and Hitler in 1941, Jadan and several other members of the Bolshoi chose to stay at their dachas or summer homes west of Moscow rather than return to Moscow as ordered. In November, 1941, a bitter winter, Jadan, his wife and younger son, along with other artists and their families all started west on foot. Jadan hoped somehow to reach Riga where he had made so many friends in 1937. Only one person in the group of 13 spoke any German, a concert master named Stenrus. Fortunately, the first German officer they met along the Front recognized that the Russians were refugee artists, not partisans.

The Jadans were sent to a Versorgungsheim, a home for the aged, orphaned and disabled in Offenbach-am-Main. The home was run by Catholic nuns who were glad to have a man like Ivan Jadan to repair bombed-out windows, make a broken grandfather clock tick again, and put the Mother Superior's dislocated knee back in joint. The nuns named Ivan, "Mann alles kann", or the man who can fix anything.

When the war ended in May, 1945, Jadan, like countless Russian refugees in Germany, was desperate to avoid the forcible repatriation President Franklin Roosevelt had agreed to at Yalta in order to please Stalin. Jadan was given protection in Weilheim, Germany, and later in Salzburg, Austria by fellow Russian refugees.

Jadan finally received a visa to the U.S. in April, 1949. Unfortunately, this was at a time when in New York, at least, the musical intelligentsia was very pro-Soviet. Olin Downes, New York Times music critic, was President of the American Soviet Friendship League. Here came Ivan Jadan, the first major artist to escape the Soviet Union since Chaliapin, a tenor judged by many Russians to be the finest Russian tenor of the century, yet unwelcome and shunned in New York. Potential sponsors for Jadan's American musical career were not interested. The late Impresario Sol Hurok said he was negotiating a U.S. appearance for the Bolshoi Ballet, and he didn't want an anti-Soviet tenor on his hands. Jadan had not risked his life to find freedom only to face this kind of attitude.

Jadan did sing for several largely Russian audiences, twice at Town Hall and once in Carnegie Hall. On March 6, after his Town Hall concert in February, 1950, Time Magazine published a feature-length review of the Jadan concert saying, "He sang with lyrical warmth and expressiveness that reminded some of Caruso indeed and he reduced many of his audience to bravos and tears." There was a 20-minute standing ovation. Madame Rachmaninoff who attended the concert said this was the first time she ever heard her brother's song Ecstasy performed because no other tenor had been able to handle the unusual tessitura that makes Ecstasy so dramatic.

The overall musical situation for Jadan in New York was not promising. Moreover, he was being followed by Soviet agents, he later learned from an FBI agent, also keeping an eye on him.

Ivan as he looked when he sang Choopchik!

In January, 1951, Jadan went to Florida with American friends, the late writer and folk historian Carl Carmer and his wife. Jadan married Doris Clabaugh in Tampa, Florida, in June, 1951.  In Tampa, from 1952 to 1955 Jadan gave major concerts.  Jadan concerts in Florida were enthusiastically received. Phil Barney of The Tampa Tribune reviewed Jadan's concert at the Centro Asturiano, May 2, 1953, stating "The golden voice of the Russian tenor, Ivan Jadan made a brilliant artistic and popular success of his recital last night in the Centro Asturiano Theater. The success was nothing less than sensational. He was effective forte and louder and marvelously stirring in all his softer tones." J. Lorton Francis, a former New York Times critic, wrote how Jadan sang "with the utmost clarity and perfect pitch...We were also constantly impressed by his phenomenal instinctive feeling for dynamic shading and fine phrasing."

As a free man  on St. John Ivan loved to fish.

Friends invited the Jadans to visit them on St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Before the small government boat had even docked, Jadan, looking at the clear, turquoise waters and green hills around him, announced decisively, "I stay here." St. John is where he wanted to work, swim, fish, and live. He lived a happy life on St. John for 40 years. On St. John, Ivan Jadan was Robinson Caruso. No one who heard him sing The Lord's Prayer at the dedication of the Lutheran Church on St. John in February, 1958, will ever forget that voice or that man.

Ivan and Doris spent more than 40 happy years on St. John.

In Tampa during 1952-55, Jadan made a number of recordings, most of them live, in concert. However many Tampa concerts that were recorded have not been located, and are still being sought.  We need help!

Jadan's older son, Vladik, who did not  escape with his father in 1941 because he was already in the Red Army, performed extraordinary archival research on his father's recordings. Vladik collected a number of records banned by Stalin after 1941 as well as recordings made in Germany.

In two Moscow TV documentaries, in 1991 and 1992, the Jadan story is brought to light. On August 3, 1994, a lengthy article in TRUD, the New York Times of Moscow, Jadan's fate as a Soviet outcast despite his glorious voice is detailed. The new Russia is ready to hear Ivan Jadan sing again. His CD is now played on Moscow radio stations

What do Russian contemporary artists & singers think of Ivan Jadan?

Singers on the ship Jadan chose

Ivan at Bolshoi, 1993

for visiting Russia three times, the Dostoevsky, were overjoyed to meet and then to hear cassette tapes of Jadan. Today's tenor from The Stanislavsky Theater, Nicolas Goudorovich, told Ivan, "I can imitate other tenors and it's fun to do. But there is one tenor I cannot imitate, Ivan Danilovich, and that tenor is you!"

That inimitable tenor, Ivan Jadan, can now be heard again on a CD of 28 digitized Jadan recordings made originally in Russia, Germany, and the U.S. from 1929 to 1955.

	How I Remember Ivan Jadan by Pavel Lisistian.
	Letter to the Museum from Samir Golescu.

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