Kayyrgül Sartbaeva

Kayyrgül Sartbaevna Sartbaeva was born on 20 June 1936 in the village of Kara-Bulak in the Kemin district of the Kirghiz Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, now part of the Chuy region of Kyrgyzstan. She came from a farming family.

She trained as a singer at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, where she studied in the vocal class of Viktoria Rozhdestvenskaya, and graduated in 1962.

In 1962 Sartbaeva joined the Kirghiz State Opera and Ballet Theatre in Frunze, now the Kyrgyz National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre named after Abdylas Maldybaev in Bishkek, as a soloist. She remained with the company until the early 2010s, and in 1969 and 1970 she spent a period training at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

A lyric dramatic soprano, she sang more than 50 roles. In Kyrgyz opera they included Aichurek in Aichurek, Jamila in Mikhail Raukhverger's Jamila, Kanykei and Kalyiman in Manas, Totuya and Valentina in Toktogul, Akbiike in Sepil and Aikanysh in Nasyr Davlesov's Kurmanbek. Her wider repertoire included Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, Liza in The Queen of Spades and Iolanta by Tchaikovsky, Desdemona in Otello, Elisabeth in Don Carlos and Aida by Verdi, Margarita in Gounod's Faust and Boito's Mefistofele, Micaela in Carmen, Zemfira in Rachmaninoff's Aleko, Yaroslavna in Prince Igor, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and Cio-Cio-San in Madama Butterfly. Her Butterfly won her a special prize, a silver medal, at an international singing competition in Tokyo in 1976.

She was also active as a chamber and concert singer and was the first performer of many songs and romances by Kyrgyz composers, among them Mukash Abdraev, Kalyi Moldobasanov and Nasyr Davlesov. About 600 of her recordings with orchestra entered the golden fund of Kyrgyz radio. She toured widely abroad, including Denmark, Canada, Cuba, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, Syria, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Sweden, Japan and China.

Alongside performing, she taught at the Kyrgyz Women's Pedagogical Institute and the Kyrgyz State Institute of Arts named after Bubusara Beishenalieva, which she led as rector from 1986 to 1989, and from 1987 was a professor of solo singing at the Kyrgyz National Conservatory named after Kalyi Moldobasanov. In later years she led a vocal masterclass for young soloists at the opera theatre.

She was named People's Artist of the Kirghiz SSR in 1974 and People's Artist of the USSR in 1980. Her other honours included the Lenin Komsomol Prize of the Kirghiz SSR (1974), the Order of the Red Banner of Labour, the Order of the Badge of Honour (1980), the Dank medal (1997), the Order of Manas third class (2002) and second class (2016), the Order of Kurmanjan Datka (2022) and honorary citizenship of Bishkek.

Sartbaeva kept her private life largely out of public view, and few details of her family were reported. In announcing her death, the Kyrgyz National Conservatory offered its condolences to her family and loved ones.

Kayyrgül Sartbaeva died on 20 October 2026 in Bishkek, aged 90. Her death was announced that day by the Kyrgyz National Conservatory and confirmed by the Abdylas Maldybaev Opera and Ballet Theatre. The cause of death was not made public.

The conservatory said that with her passing Kyrgyz art had lost one of its brightest stars, an outstanding personality whose talent went far beyond the stage and whose name had become a symbol of high mastery, beauty of voice and selfless service to art. Her death was reported by Sputnik Kyrgyzstan, TASS, Vedomosti, Lenta.ru and Kyrgyz news sites. Funeral arrangements had not been reported at the time of writing.

Sartbaeva belonged to the generation of singers who established Kyrgyz opera on the Soviet and international stage, and her long tenure as a soloist, her hundreds of radio recordings and her decades of teaching shaped the national school of singing. Her recordings in the golden fund of Kyrgyz radio preserve a repertoire that ran from the founding works of Kyrgyz opera to the classics of Russian and Italian opera.