Dubravka Nešović

Dubravka Nešović was a Serbian singer, a lyric mezzo-soprano known for old urban songs (starogradske pesme), romances and folk songs. She was born on 31 August 1932 in Novi Bečej and died on 23 April 2019 in Belgrade.

Her parents, Nataša Nešović and Milorad Majin, were actors in a travelling theatre, and she was raised by her grandparents in Novi Bečej, where as a little girl she learned her first notes, played the piano and sang in a choir. After school she went to Niš to study piano at the music school, but her teachers heard her voice, and she was cast in the play Koštana, which she performed for three years in Niš and then on stages across Yugoslavia.

She continued her studies in Belgrade, at the Stanković music school and then at the Faculty of Music in the class of Zlata Đunđenac, where she studied alongside Biserka Cvejić and Radmila Bakočević and graduated as the best student. A state scholarship took her to Bruges in Belgium, where she studied church singing and became the first master of singing in the Yugoslavia of the time. Back in Belgrade she sang as a soloist with the Radio Belgrade choir and the Branko Krsmanović choir, touring the world and performing at La Scala and the Salle Gaveau in Paris.

At the same time she built a career singing urban songs and romances in Serbian, Russian and Hungarian. She sang at many festivals and was a regular guest of Yugoslav radio and television; at Beogradsko proleće she won the first audience prize in 1973 with "Rastanak". She recorded for the Radio Belgrade archive, often opened the Skadarlija summer season and acted at the Terazije Theatre, and she sang the theme for the 1961 film Leto je krivo za sve.

In her career she released 18 singles, 5 LPs and 2 CDs for PGP RTB and Jugoton, and she performed more than 3,500 charity concerts. She dedicated "Kad bi ove ruže male" (1958) to Novi Bečej, the town of her childhood, and her best-known songs also include "Bolujem ja", "Ima dana" and "Crveni šal". In the house of Đura Jakšić in Skadarlija she ran her own School of Beautiful Singing, where she taught many singers, among them the Teofilović brothers.