Philemon Koridze

The Righteous Philemon Koridze was a Georgian opera singer, a bass, regarded as one of the founders of Georgian opera. The Georgian Orthodox Church canonized him in December 2011 under the name Righteous Philemon the Singer. He was born in 1829 and departed this life in 1911.

His father's name appears in Russian sources in two forms, so he is called Philemon Isaevich or Yaseevich Koridze. He sang under the stage name Corigio. In the 1860s he studied in Milan with the teacher Ronconi, and then sang in several cities of Italy and in South America. In 1872 he appeared at La Scala, and in 1873 at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. From 1874 to 1881 he toured in Italy.

From 1881 he was an artist of the Tbilisi opera theatre. He sang roles from operas by Glinka (Ivan Susanin, Ruslan and Lyudmila), from Rubinstein's The Demon and Don Basilio in Rossini's The Barber of Seville, among others.

He also wrote down and collected folk and church chants, directed a choir, and published four collections of church chants between 1895 and 1904. He composed pieces for voice and piano and for piano, and compiled a textbook of music theory, which appeared in 1895.

The Synod of the Georgian Orthodox Church canonized him in December 2011 as a righteous man. The sources at hand give no news of his spiritual life or of the day of his commemoration.