Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko was born in
1859 in
Russia to a
military family; he was an
inveterate gambler who supported himself, by and large, with his pen: he worked as a
war correspondent,
novelist, art
critic,
playwright and also as an
actor. In
1897 he had a meeting which changed his life: at the Slavyansky Bazaar
restaurant in
Moscow he had lunch with
Constantin Stanislavsky; 18 hours later the meeting concluded at the Stanislavsky
estate in a village near the
capital. The
historic meeting consolidated a
visionary goal that the two men shared: to create a modern performing arts centre. Just over a year later, the
Moscow Art Theatre was founded. Both men devoted much of the rest of their lives to this project. Because of his work on the process of acting, Stanislavsky is the better-known in the west today, but Nemirovich-Danchenko was the genius behind the
repertoire, and was
instrumental in bringing the works of such greats as
Anton Chekhov and
Leo Tolstoy to the Theatre's stage.
Nemirovich-Danchenko had time for other projects as well. He founded a music studio in 1919 which became the Opera Studio in 1926, and the Moscow Art Theatre School in 1943. With the Opera Studio he was one of the first producers to use singing actors in famous productions such as a version of Carmen called "Carmencita and the Soldier" and Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk". Nemirovich-Danchenko died in 1943, but his name, and that of his famous collaborator, lives on in Moscow's Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theatre.