The sheet music was donated to the museum by Anna Ilyinichna Ulyanova-Elizarova in February 1930 when Dmitry Mikhailovich Tainov, director of the Vladimir Lenin Apartment-Museum in Ulyanovsk, visited her in Moscow.
The cover is a cardboard binding, on the upper, front side of which there is a diamond-shaped sticker with the embossed initials “M.B.”. This monogram indicates that the notes belonged to Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova, the mother of Anna and Vladimir Ulyanov. The letter “B” stands for “Blank”, her maiden name, which she changed in 1863 when she married Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov. Thus, the sheet music was acquired or received as a gift before marriage. On the first sheet there is a handwritten inscription “M. Ulyanova”.
“Music always played a special role in the Ulyanov family. Maria Alexandrovna passionately loved music and played it with great spirit… Maria Alexandrovna performed perfectly on the piano the operas ‘La Traviata’, ‘Askold’s Grave’, excerpts from the operas ‘Troubadour’ and ‘Tannhäuser’. She instilled a love of music in her children. Olga Ilyinichna was the one who knew music especially well and loved it,” from the memoirs of Olga Dmitrievna Ulyanova, the niece of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
The sheet music that is presented in the collection is “I Puritani”. This is an opera in three acts by the Italian Vincenzo Bellini, on the text of which in 1834 he and the emigrant poet, librettist Carlo Pepoli worked together in Paris. The work is based on a French play “Roundheads and Cavaliers” by playwright Jacques-Francois Anselot and novelist Joseph-Xavier Boniface, or Saintine.
