The year 2013 is a year of the 140th anniversary of the birth and the 70th anniversary of death of the great Russian actor and legendary singer Feodor Ivanovich Chaliapin (1873–1938).
A native of Kazan and a son of a Vyatka peasant, Feodor Chaliapin began his career as a singer of a church choir. His love for singing that captivated him with so much power gave birth to a dream of becoming a professional actor.
Chaliapin considered 1889 the beginning of his acting career when he joined a drama company of Vladimir Serebryakov. In March 1890, he had his first solo performance as Zaretsky in the opera Eugene Onegin (production of the Kazan Society of Stage Art Lovers). In the same year, Chaliapin became a member of entrepreneur Semyon Semyonov-Samarsky's tour company, in spring of 1891, a member of a Ukrainian troupe of Georgy Derkach, and in 1892 a member of officer Klyucharyov's opera company.
Dmitri Usatov played a huge part in Chaliapin's acting career. A former Bolshoi singer, Usatov not only taught the young actor for free (Tiflis, 1892–1893) but also supported him funds.
In 1893, Chaliapin moved to Moscow, and in 1894 to St. Petersburg where he sang in Mikhail Lentovsky's opera company of at Arcadia and then at Valerian Panayev's theatre. In 1895, when he was 22 years old, Chaliapin became an actor of the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre. Savva Mamontov, a well-known philanthropist who ran an opera theatre in Moscow talked Chaliapin into joining his troupe. A few years as an actor of Mamontov's Russian Private Opera which was known for its novelty productions and freedom of expressive means allowed Chaliapin to display his stage talent and phenomenal creative growth.
The next remarkable milestones in Chaliapin's life were his work at the Imperial Russian Opera (the Bolshoi Theatre) and after the October Revolution at the Mariinsky Opera Theatre as an artistic director. In 1921, Chaliapin left the country for a long tour, in particular, in the United States where Solomon Hurok was his entrepreneur. During that period, he made over fifty records with mainly Russian music.
Chaliapin passed away in Paris in 1938 and was buried at the Batignolles Cemetery. In 1984, his ashes were taken to the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Chaliapin entered the galaxy of legendary singers primarily as an opera artist. On operatic stage, he created his brightest and most unforgettable roles. However, his inimitable performances of romances and Russian songs were as important.
His numerous chamber concerts before capacity crowds, and as his operatic performances amazed with their beauty, fidelity and new renditions of popular vocal pieces. The singer's concert repertoire included more than twenty Russian songs and a great number of romances. He preferred compositions by Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, Arensky, Anton Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky and of course Mussorgsky whom he esteemed the most of the Russian composers.
According to his daughter Irina, Feodor Chaliapin love Russian music very much and sang lyrical songs with a special feeling. The song Eh Vanka is a good example. Following a Russian tradition, Chaliapin sang this song a capella. His performance of Dubinushka was especially popular. Chaliapin liked the song very much and frequently closed his concert with it inviting the audience to sing along. At the height of the events of 1905, he sang Dubinushka during a concert at the Bolshoi. On the next day, newspapers predicted the artist would not get away with it and certainly be sacked. The directorate of the Imperial Theatres demanded that Chaliapin send then the text of the song he performed at the concert. The artist wrote down the lyrics. The sheet of paper with the words of Dubinushka written in Chaliapin's bold hand is preserved in the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum in Moscow.
Chaliapin often filled his songs and romance with brilliant theatricality borrowed from the operatic genre (Old Corporal by Dargomyzhsky, Trepak and The Song of the Flea by Mussorgsky) or rejected it completely in favour of concentration on spiritual and emotional mood of a piece (The Prophet by Rimsky-Korsakov and The Nightingale by Tchaikovsky).
Chaliapin is hard to repeat. Listening to his recordings, it's even harder to imagine a different rendition of these compositions, so convincing his art is perfected through constant inner labour of mind.
"When I sing, I always have an image I realize in front of me… I sing and listen, I act and observe. I am never alone on stage… There are two Chaliapins on stage" (Feodor Chaliapin, Mask and Soul).
"You are the first in the art of music as Tolstoy is the first in the art of word… These are not words of an adulator but a Russian man who loves you sincerely, for whom you are a symbol of Russian might and talent (…) in the Russian arts, Chaliapin is an epoch similar to Pushkin."
(from Alexei Gorky's letter to Chaliapin, March 1913)
