In 1895, the directorate of the Imperial Theaters sent the novice opera singer Fyodor Chaliapin to St. Petersburg Opera Company. On the stage of the Mariinsky Theater, she successfully performed parts of Ruslan and Lyudmila in Ruslan by Mephistopheles and Mikhail Glinka in Charles Gounod’s Faust. The singer also appeared in Domenico Cimarosa’s comic opera The Secret Marriage, but his ability to perform various parts was not appreciated. Contemporaries recalled that in the 1895-1896 season, Chaliapin “appeared quite rarely, and moreover, in games that did not suit him.”
Savva Mamontov, a railway entrepreneur and philanthropist, took advantage of this, noticing Chaliapin’s extraordinary talent and temperament on the stage of the Panaevsky Theater in St. She persuaded the inexperienced singer to join the Private Russian Opera troupe.
“Weakly developed uppers. Let him get used to the stage for about two years, ”said the boss of Chaliapin’s talent.
In 1896, Mamontov invited the artist to performances held as part of an exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod. Locals greeted the unknown artist with cold blood. At the time, the newspaper Volgar wrote that “sometimes a very cheeky young man wanders around the stage saying something to himself”.
“Among the players, we will note Mr. Chaliapin, whose wide bass range sounds good, albeit not particularly strong in dramatic places. The artist does not play badly, ”the newspaper said, although I would like less pomp and pretension.
Realizing the potential of Chaliapin, Mamontov hired an accompanist who taught the singer proper breathing and articulation. The benefactor advised the singer to start the day with vocal exercises and rehearsed some scenes with her. At the same time, Chaliapin’s contract with the Mariinsky Theater remained valid, and St. He had to return to Petersburg. However, Mamontov did not want to share the artist and paid a large fine to the imperial theaters. Later, Chaliapin, St. He remembered the differences he had seen between the St. Petersburg theaters and the Mammoth Opera.
“I immediately felt the difference between the luxurious cemetery of my imperial theater with its magnificent sarcophagi and this soft green space with simple fragrant flowers. No official came to the stage, did not poke his finger, did not break his eyebrows, ”wrote Chaliapin.
The benefactor said, “Fedenka, you can do whatever you want in this theater! If you have to stage an opera, we will stage an opera. For you”. The singer had long dreamed of playing the role of Ivan the Terrible, and he got it in the first season of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Maid of Pskov. Chaliapin also played The Wanderer in Rogneda, Vyazminsky in the Oprichnik during his first year in Mamontov’s opera. He played yi and several other roles.
In October 1897, Mamontov hired 24-year-old Sergei Rachmaninoff as second chief. She collaborated with Mammoth Theater for one season and also agreed to work with artists over the summer to learn about next season’s tracks.
Rachmaninov took great interest in Chaliapin and helped him arrange the sheet music for the operas Judith, Mozart and Salieri and Boris Godunov. Their premiere took place in the fall of 1898.
“Rakhmaninov brought Chaliapin’s musical stage development to the level of professional maturity,” wrote musicologist Vera Rossikhina.
The singer studied for four years at the Private Opera. During this time, he honed his talent, gained a lot of experience and gained wide popularity. The artist acted in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas Sadko (The Varangian Guest) and Mozart and Salieri (Salieri), Alexander Dargomyzhsky’s Mermaid (Melnik), and Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar (Ivan Susanin). (Boris Godunov) and” Khovanshchina “(Dosifey) Modest Mussorgsky et al.
In 1899, Chaliapin left the Mammoth Theater. The philanthropist realized that the singer had already surpassed his opera, but for a long time he did not pay attention to the rumors about the negotiations between Vladimir Telyakovsky, the director of the Moscow office of the Imperial Theaters, and Chaliapin.
The singer signed a contract with the Bolshoi Theater after a drunken banquet in the restaurant Slavyansky Bazaar, organized by Telyakovsky. For Mamontov, this seemed humiliating. Soon, the artist Konstantin Korovin left the boss. With his arrival at the Bolshoi Theater, the flowering of Chaliapin’s creativity began: his performances were a great success, and visits to the Mariinsky Theater were equated with a significant event. In 1901, the singer gave ten performances at the La Scala theater in Milan.
In September 1899, Mamontov was unable to pay his creditors and was imprisoned in Taganka prison for embezzlement of “railway” funds. The theater played the 1899-1900 season under the name of the Russian Private Opera Society and existed until 1904. Its budget consisted of personal contributions from artists.
In the summer of 1900, the famous lawyer Fyodor Plevako defended the entrepreneur in court. Mamontov was acquitted, but by then he was truly devastated.
Korovin wrote in the Memoirs of Fyodor Chaliapin that during this difficult period Chaliapin never visited Mamontov. “I wrote to Fedenka Chaliapin, but for some reason he did not visit me,” said Mamontov, when the artist came to the entrepreneur, who was under house arrest in his son’s house. Discussing this situation with Korovin later, Serov said about Chaliapin: “There is not enough heart.” Before his death, Mamontov bequeathed that the singer would not be allowed to attend his funeral. At the same time, Chaliapin later wrote in his biography: “I owe my fame to Savva Ivanovich. I will be grateful to him for the rest of my life.”