Feodor Chaliapin
"I do not believe in one-sole talent force, without hard work. It will exhale without her the biggest talent, as the spring will stall in the desert, without piercing the roads through the sands."
Chaliapin was born to a poor family. He worked as an apprentice to a shoemaker, a sales clerk, a carpenter, and a lowly clerk in a district court before joining, at age 17, a local operetta company. Two years later he went to study in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia), and in 1896 he became a member of the private Mamontov opera company, where he mastered the Russian, French, and Italian roles that made him famous. In 1895 he debuted at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre as Mephistopheles in Charles Gounod’s Faust. In 1901 he sang at La Scala under Arturo Toscanini, alongside Enrico Caruso.
Chaliapin’s interpretation of the title role in Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov was his most famous. His other major dramatic parts included Philip II in Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlos, Ivan the Terrible in Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Maid of Pskov, and the title (and, for him, the signature) role in Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele. His great comic characterizations were Don Basilio in Gioachino Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia and Leporello in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
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