Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Silver-Maned Baritone From Siberia, Dies at 55<br />An announcement said, “Although his voice and vocal condition are normal, his sense of balance has been severely affected.”<br />He canceled his summer appearances to undergo treatment in London, his main home since the 1990s, and it seemed doubtful<br />that he would be able to fulfill his commitment to the Met, which had scheduled him to sing six performances in October in a revival of its 2009 production of Verdi’s “Il Trovatore,” with Mr. Hvorostovsky in the lead role of Count di Luna.<br />An only child, Mr. Hvorostovsky lived mostly with his maternal grandmother, whom he adored,<br />and his volatile step-grandfather, a broken-down war hero, whom Mr. Hvorostovsky described in 2003 in a profile in The New Yorker as “vain, arrogant and deeply alcoholic.”<br />He remained devoted to his father, an engineer, and his mother, a gynecologist.<br />There “have been many beautiful voices,’’ the soprano Renée Fleming said, “but in my opinion none more beautiful than Dmitri’s.”<br />Early on, Mr. Hvorostovsky (pronounced voh-roh-STOV-ski) excelled as Valentin in Gounod’s “Faust,” Belcore in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore”<br />and the title role of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” which he played with captivating suavity.<br />Debuts followed in Nice, France; Amsterdam; Barcelona, Spain; Venice; and London, where he introduced to Europe roles<br />that would define his later career, including Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Yeletsky in “The Queen of Spades,” the role in which he made his Met debut in 1995.<br />He sang a program of Russian songs as well as some German ones by Richard Strauss, including several<br />that seemed to be parting messages to his devoted fans, like Tchaikovsky’s “The Nightingale,” with lyrics by Pushkin, which include these lines:<br />Dig me a grave In the broad open field At my head plant Flowers of scarlet.
