Elijah Moshinsky

Elijah Moshinsky (8 January 1946 – 14 January 2021) was an Australian opera director, theatre director and television director who worked for the Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan Opera, the Royal National Theatre, and BBC Television, among other organisations.

Early years Moshinsky's Russian Jewish parents had fled from Vladivostok to the French Concession of Shanghai, where Elijah was born. When he was five years old, the family moved to Melbourne. He attended Camberwell High School Moshinsky supported himself as an undergraduate by playing the third flute at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. He graduated from the University of Melbourne and in 1973 won a scholarship to St Antony's College, Oxford, where he specialised in the study of Alexander Herzen.

While still at St Antony's, Moshinsky directed a production of As You Like It for the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company.

Opera director In 1975, Moshinsky made his operatic debut at the Royal Opera House with "a stripped-down, low-budget production of Peter Grimes [with Jon Vickers] which won enormous popular and critical success." For the Lyric Opera of Chicago he directed Samson, The Bartered Bride, Nabucco, Lohengrin, The Pirates of Penzance, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, Samuel Barber's Antony and Cleopatra. For Welsh Opera he directed Berlioz's Béatrice et Bénédict, Cavalleria rusticanna. For Scottish Opera he directed La bohème and La forza del destino. At English National Opera in 1982, he directed the British premiere of Le Grand Macabre as well as Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and The Bartered Bride. Other engagements have included Wozzeck for the Adelaide Festival, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Boris Godunov, Il trovatore, The Barber of Seville, Rigoletto, La traviata, Don Carlo with Opera Australia, I vespri siciliani in Geneva and Benvenuto Cellini at the Maggio Musicale in Florence, He also directed the first production of Nigel Williams' adaptation of Lord of the Flies for the RSC.

Television director Moshinsky made a number of television films, mostly of operas. Non-operatic works, mainly for the BBC, include a number of Shakespeare's plays, televised between 1980 and 1985: All's Well That Ends Well, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Cymbeline with Helen Mirren, Coriolanus with Alan Howard and Irene Worth, and Love's Labour's Lost. He also directed Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh in Ibsen's Ghosts (1986) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals (1987). He also directed a three-part serial version of Kingsley Amis' novel The Green Man (1990).

In January 2021, Moshinsky had a fall at his London home, and was taken to hospital where he contracted COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. He died in London on 14 January 2021.