Feodor Chaliapin was born on
February 1 (OS)
1873 in
Kazan, in the wing of merchant Lisitzin's house on Rybnoryadskaya Street (now
Pushkin Street) 10. This wing exists no longer, but the house with the yard where the wing was situated is still there. The next day, Candlemas Day (The Meeting of Our Lord), Feodor was baptized in Bogoyavlenskaya church on former Bolshaya Prolomnaya street (nowadays
Bauman Street). His godparents were the neighbours: the shoemaker Nikolay Tonkov and 12-year-old girl Ludmilochka Kharitonova. The dwelling was expensive for his father, Ivan Yakovlevich, who served as a clerk in the Zemskaya Uprava (Land Council), and in 1878 the Chaliapin family moved to the village Ametyevo (also Ometyevo, or the Ometyev settlements, now a settlement within Kazan) behind the area of Sukonnaya Sloboda, and settled in a small house.
Largely self-taught, he began his career at
Tbilisi and the Imperial Opera,
St. Petersburg in
1894; he was then invited to sing at the Mamontov Private Opera (1896-1899) and later at the
Bolshoi Theatre in
Moscow, where he appeared regularly from
1899 to
1914. From
1914, Chaliapin appeared regularly at the
Zimin Private Opera in
Moscow.
From
1901, Chaliapin began appearing the West, making his debut at
La Scala that year in a production of
Boito's Mefistofele under the baton of
Arturo Toscanini, who at the end of career observed that the Russian bass was the greatest operatic talent with whom he had ever worked. The singer's
Metropolitan Opera debut in the
1907 season was said to have been unspectacular, but he returned in
1921 and sang there with immense success for eight seasons. In
1913, Chaliapin was introduced to
London and
Paris by
Diaghilev, at which point he began giving well-received solo recitals in which he also performed traditional Russian folk songs. Among these songs are
Along Peterskaya, which he recorded with a British-based Russian folk instruments orchestra, and the song he made famous throughout the world:
The Song of the Volga Boatmen.
After the
Russian Revolution, Chaliapin was at first treated as a distinguished artist of
Soviet Russia. However, the harsh everyday life and the psychological climate during the Civil War, as well as, reportedly, the encroachment on some of his property by the Communist authorities <a class="externalLink" href="
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http://www.grazhdanin.com/grazhdanin.phtml?var=Arkhiv/2002/16-17/statya10&number=?16-17%C2%A02002%D0%B3</a> caused him to remain outside Russia after
1921. He still maintained that he was not anti-Soviet. Chaliapin moved to
Finland and later lived in
France.
Chaliapin's most famous role was the title role of
Boris Godunov (excerpts of which he recorded
1929-31), but is remembered for
Ivan the Terrible in
Rimsky-Korsakov's Maid of Pskov, Mephistopheles in
Gounod's Faust,
Massenet's Don Quichotte, and Bertram in
Meyerbeer's Robert le diable. Thanks to his famous performances, Russian operas like
Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and
Khovanshchina,
Glinka's Ivan Susanin,
Borodin's Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov's
The Tsar's Bride became well known in the West. He made one sound film for director
G.W. Pabst, the 1933 film version of
Don Quixote. Rather than going out in one version with subtitles, the film was made in three different versions - French, English, and German, as was sometimes the custom then. Chaliapin starred in all three versions, all of which used the same script, sets and costumes, but different supporting casts. The English and the French versions are the most often seen, and are being released in May 2006 on one
DVD. Pabst's film was not a version of the
Massenet opera, but a dramatic adaptation of
Cervantes' novel, with music and songs by
Jacques Ibert.
In
1932, Chaliapin published a memoir,
Man and Mask: Forty Years in the Life of a Singer, prepared in collaboration with
Maxim Gorky.
Chaliapin died in
1938 of
leukaemia aged 65 in
Paris. In
1984, his remains were transferred from Paris to
Moscow for interment in the
Novodevichy Cemetery.
One son,
Feodor Chaliapin, Jr.. (
1905-1992), had a notable career in film as a character actor.
Another son, Boris Chaliapin, had a notable career as an artist having painted the portraits used on 413 Time Magazine covers starting with the August 24, 1942 issue.
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