Chaliapin, FI

NAME: Chaliapin, Fyodor Ivanovich.

ACHIEVEMENTS: Greatest singer/actor of his time.

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: February 1 1873, near the city of Kazan, Russia

DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: April 12, 1938, Paris.  Aged 65.

DISCIPLINE: Opera

LANGUAGE: Russian, French

PARENTS: Ivan Yakovlevich Chaliapin (1838-1901) civil servant, Avdotia Mikhailovna Chaliapina (1845-1891) peasant.

SIBLINGS: One brother: Vassili Chaliapin,  nurse, died in 1915. Two other siblings, Nikolai and Eudokia, died in infancy

SPOUSE: Iola Tornaghi (ballet dancer) 1898. A second marriage in exile, 1920s..

CHILDREN: Sons: Fyodor Chaliapin Jr. (1905-1992) Character actor in films, and Boris (1904-1979) painter and illustrator, cover artist for Time magazine. Daughters: Dasya, Irina, Lydia, Marfa, Marina, Tatiana.

EDUCATION: Almost none, a self taught singer in tiny provincial opera companies, he was rescued from starvation by the tenor Usatov, who gave him a year of instruction in everything from vocal technique to reading and table manners.

MAJOR WORK: Made the Russian opera repertoire viable on the international stage, revolutionized acting.

LIFE AND TIMES:

His Czarist-era passport included the entry: “Origin: peasant,” marking him as a second-class citizen in his homeland. Born in a provincial backwater of the Russian Empire, his childhood was spent in a hell of poverty, starvation, alcoholism and violence.

From this beginning, he rose to become one of the most famous artists in the world, commanding fees half again as great as those of his contemporary Caruso*.

His voice was of the first rank, a powerful basso cantante, so strong in its upper range that he sang baritone roles like Rigoletto in his youth. Nearly six and half feet tall, broad shouldered and muscular, he brought an unprecedented athleticism onto the operatic stage. By his own account, he performed in every genre (opera, operetta, choral singing, drama, comedy, tumbling, acrobatics, juggling) except the circus.

Stage-struck after seeing a performance of a famous folk-comedian, Yashka, and fascinated by music after joining a choir, Chaliapin left his family at 17. Acting and singing in obscurity, he also worked as a stevedore and clerk. At 19 he washed up in the city of Tiflis, so destitute that he was eating only on every second or third day. On impulse, he auditioned for the voice teacher Usatov, who taught and supported him from Sept. 1892 to Sept 1893. This year, and his choir experience as a child, was the only musical instruction that Chaliapin ever received.

In 1895-6 Chaliapin spent an unhappy year in the Marinsky Theatre (now the Kirov), where his colleagues included Stravinsky*’s father, Fyodor. While his singing was reasonably well received, he chafed at the rigid Imperial bureaucracy and was uncomfortable attempting to ‘act’ in the accepted manner.

While consulting with the actor Dalsky, Chaliapin discovered his need to investigate the whole personality of each character he portrayed. In his memoirs, Chaliapin described this deeper understanding as “finding the intonation of the character.” Working from this intellectual and emotional preparation, he found that vocal character and physical expression flowed naturally from the character’s “character.”

The impresario Mamontov engaged Chaliapin for his Moscow Private Opera Company in 1896. A major supporter of Russian artists, including Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre, Mamontov gathered a brilliant circle of singers, designers, costumers and musicians to the project. Chaliapin was given free reign to develop his new techniques. The Mamontov productions put the static, formal product of the Bolshoi to shame and made Chaliapin a national figure.

Mamontov’s company sought to restore Russian works to the stage at a time when the Bolshoi and Marinsky ignored them in favor of a middle-of-the-road Western repertoire. With Mamontov, Chaliapin made indelible impressions as Boris Godunov and Varlaam in Mussorgsky*'s masterpiece, Dosifey in Khovanshchina, Ivan the Terrible in The Maid of Pskov, the Miller in Dargomizhsky's Rusalka, and Holofernes (Serov's Judith), while creating Rimsky-Korsakov*'s Salieri in 1898.

During his time wiith Mamontov, Chaliapin met and married the dancer Iola Tornaghi, and formed lifelong friendships with Gorky and Rachmaninov*,  the latter engaged to conduct him in a production of Samson and Delilah. Chalipin’s circle of acquaintances and admirers comprised the whole of Russia’s cultural elite, including Chekhov* and Tolstoy*.

Mamontov was ruined and imprisoned in a political plot in 1899, though completely exonerated he never recovered financially or personally. Chaliapin reluctantly moved on to the Bolshoi, and eventually to the international stage, premiering at La Scala in 1901, and the Metropolitan in 1907.

In 1908-10 and 1913, Chaliapin sang in Diaghilev*’s spectacular Paris seasons and created the title role in Massenet*’s  Don Quixote. In 1913-14 he dominated the season at Covent Garden under the baton of Beecham*. Only in America was there any critical resistance to Chaliapin, his overwhelming physicality, and the frank sexuality he incorporated in his acting were too much for puritanical Americans.

In Russia, worsening political conditions put Chaliapin in a vice. As a peasant, an intellectual and a social liberal, he was under enormous pressure from the Czarist establishment and the leftist intelligentsia. In the midst of the Revolution, Chaliapin was hired as singer and artistic director of the Marinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. He remained in Russia for five years after the Bolsheviks came to power, viewing with increasing dismay the violence, cruelty and philistinism of the new regime. In 1921, he joined the ranks of the exiles, never to return.

Chaliapin continued to perform and record until his final illness in 1938. In 1933, he appeared in his only film, a version of Don Quixote directed by G.W. Pabst, with music by Jacque Ibert, Sir George Robey, the British music-hall legend was his Sancho. Chaliapin died of leukemia in Paris; in 1984 his ashes were returned to Moscow and interred in the Novodevichy cemetery.

ASSESSMENT: Chaliapin’s make-up designs were famous but he created them afresh for each performance, using the process to “tune in” to the character His emotional authenticity was absolute, but he was never guilty of the kind of pseudo-psychotherapeutic excesses of the “method” actors who claim the Russian legacy.

EXTRA CONNECTIONS:  He was admired by Stanislavsky* andSaint-Saëns*

ONELINER: Chaliapin, one of the greatest opera singers of all time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Borovsky, Victor. (1988) Chaliapin: a critical biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Chaliapin, Feodor. Stranitsi iz moyey zhizni: avtobiografiya (Leningrad, 1926; Eng. trans., 1927, as Pages from my Life)

Chaliapin, Feodor. Maska i dusha: moi sorok let na teatrakh (Paris,1932; Eng. trans., 1932 as Man and Mask)

Gorky, Maxim. (1969) Chaliapin: an autobiography as told to Maxim Gorky . New York: Stein and Day. (Includes much of the previous two works).