Singing in Exile

Soviet writer Maxim Gorky once wrote that Fyodor Shalyapin – best known as an international opera singer – was a “more than humanly talented man.” And, while this may be a slight exaggeration, in a way he was right. Even without his great voice, Shalyapin’s height, energy, emotions and ability to make friends singled him out from the crowd, and his name was always linked with two adjectives – big and powerful. He was a citizen not only of Russia, but of the world.

The majority of Shalyapin’s 65 years belonged to Russia, and he lived through what was arguably the most difficult and interesting period of his country’s history. Although he performed all over the world and ultimately left his homeland, he always considered himself a son of Russia. “My life is hard,” wrote the singer, “but good! I have experienced moments of great happiness thanks to my art, which I love passionately. Love is always happiness, whatever we love, but love of art is the greatest happiness of our life.”

Humble Beginnings

Shalyapin was born in February of 1873 in a small village near Kazan (present-day Tatarstan). His father, Ivan Shalyapin, was a scribe for the Kazan district council. Every day he walked 12 verstS (about 8 miles) – from home to work and back. His modest wages barely sufficed to feed his wife and three children. But it got worse when he turned to drink. The family fell into poverty, and the blows that the father doled out to all members of the family could not have helped matters. As Shalyapin wrote in his autobiography Pages from My Life, his childhood was a mixture of poverty, hunger and beatings. And he was beaten not only by his father, but also by the leatherworkers, bookbinders and painters under whom he served as an apprentice.

Fyodor developed an interest in theater very early in life. He first attended a theater production at the age of 12. In another autobiography The Mask and the Soul, he wrote: “I sometimes ask myself why the theater not only attracted my attention, but completely filled my being. The explanation is simple. The reality surrounding me contained very little that was positive. In the reality of my life, I saw coarse acts, heard rude words, but the environment of Kazan’s Sukonnaya sloboda [Ed: the name of the Shalyapins’ village] in which fate saw fit to place me was especially coarse. My first visit to the theater resonated throughout my being precisely because it supported in an obvious way my vague premonitions that life could be different – finer, nobler.”

Shalyapin’s childhood and early life were remarkably similar to Maxim Gorky’s (Gorky even helped Shalyapin to write his first autobiography Pages from My Life.) Both, in spite of adversity and poverty, ascended to the heights of Russian art. By the age of 15, Shalyapin had tried many different trades. He worked as a scribe, sang for several years in church choirs, learning to read both words and music in literally one summer and sang at festivals, weddings and funerals for food. He managed to study at several private schools, including a religious school from which he was expelled for refusing to endure the unfair punishment and harsh discipline. And in spite of all this, Shalyapin wrote,  “I finished studying when I was 13, and even finished, to the surprise of my parents, with special merits.” At 15, he left home to make his living. Over several years of wandering, he sang in choirs and secondary theatrical roles for various provincial troupes, accepting any theater work that came his way.

Shalyapin’s fate changed dramatically when he approached professor and former imperial theater artist Dmitry Usatov in Tiflis (as Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, was then called) and requested to learn the art of singing. With amazing kindness, the maestro not only agreed to teach the 17-year-old Shalyapin singing free of charge, but also, sparing the young man’s pride, found a patron who paid Shalyapin a stipend for food and general living expenses.

Usatov was a strict and demanding teacher who instilled in his pupils the notion that talent is impossible without constant hard work. “I always listened carefully and lovingly to the teachings of this man, who, in dragging me out of the dirt, unselfishly imparted to me his labor, energy and knowledge,” Shalyapin wrote. Usatov played an enormous role in Shalyapin’s life. Thanks to him, the young singer managed to sign a contract with the Tiflis State Opera theater. Usatov’s prediction about Shalyapin’s repertoire also turned out to be prophetic: “The Mermaid and Faust,” he said, “these are your bread-winners. And also Life for the Tsar.”

Changing the Face of Opera

As it turned out, these were exactly the operas that helped Shalyapin to win over audiences and colleagues alike and to perform in St. Petersburg and then in Nizhny Novgorod, where he met Savva Mamontov, one of the greatest Russian art patrons of the day and the owner of a private opera house in Moscow. Thanks to Mamontov, Shalyapin’s personal and creative good fortune was secured. With Mamontov’s help and blessing, Shalyapin married ballerina Iola Tornagi (they had five children together – three girls and two boys, whom Shalyapin adored and took great pride in).

Mamontov then accepted Shalyapin into his troupe, after first paying the forfeit for the singer’s broken contract with the State Opera. And it was Mamontov who helped Shalyapin’s talent to fully reveal itself by extending him complete creative freedom, both in choosing his repertoire and in interpreting scenes. Shalyapin began the theatrical season of 1896-1897 as Susanin in Life for the Tsar and as Mephistopheles in Faust. And gradually, Shalyapin found himself creating a new alternative to the Italian style of opera that prevailed on the Russian stage at that time.

He was 25 and made no claims to being a reformer of his art. But this came about naturally nonetheless. Shalyapin believed that operatic art was more than simply vocal art, as Italian tradition dictated. Arguing with Shalyapin, a well-known singer of the Alexandrinsky Theater maintained that: “You can’t do Shakespeare as an opera” – which was the generally accepted opinion among even such opera connoisseurs as Mamontov. But Shalyapin did not believe this. He wrote: “I saw that, in The Mermaid, Dargomyzhsky, clearly adding some elements of dramatic effect, attempted to unite opera and drama into one whole, and I saw that, on the contrary, in opera, singers and directors always emphasize lyric moments to the detriment of drama and thus take away the soul, the strength of the opera.”

And so began Shalyapin’s search for his path in art, for his own repertoire, his own interpretation. By now, his solutions are already classics: the necessity for exact and expressive gestures in an opera singer, for the right intonation, strong self-control on stage and just the right face make-up. At the end of the last century, these were Shalyapin’s creative discoveries, these were his true innovations, along with the conviction that the success of a production is due not only to the personal success of a great artist, but rather to a collective of like-minded people. “Collective creativity is possible only under the conditions of a consciousness among all workers of a single goal and the necessity of realizing it.” Shalyapin advances this idea in the book The Mask and the Soul, which is addressed to the younger generation of artists. He also instilled this idea in his colleagues everywhere that he sang and worked on productions.

By the end of the century, Shalyapin’s triumphs on the Russian stage were already attracting the attention of Western cultural figures. On invitation, Shalyapin performed on the stages of the Paris Grand Opera, Milan’s La Scala (where he was introduced to the great Tamannio and Mazzini and Monte Carlo. Shalyapin’s repertoire increased year by year and month by month: the miller in The Mermaid, the Varangian guest in Sadko, Don Bazillio in The Barber of Seville, Mephistopheles in Boito’s opera, Faust in Guno’s opera, Boris in Boris Godunov – it would be difficult to list them all. His trips abroad were later interspersed with concert tours throughout Russia, and his life went on the road once and for all. Trips within Russia and abroad, along with the propaganda of high art, became the singer’s goal and raison d’être.

In 1906, Shalyapin’s personal life went through an important change – a second marriage to Maria Petsold. In order not to traumatize his children, Shalyapin made an agreement with his first wife to preserve the appearance of their former relationship, and for several years, the singer lived in two homes – in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Moreover, Iola Tornagi did everything she could to ensure that all five children continued to love and respect their father.

Among Shalyapin’s many talents, he had a rare ability to make genuine and long-lasting friendships. As a young man, he was close friends with the artists Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korovin, and later with Ilya Repin. Another friend was Vasily Andreev, the talented Russian balalaika player, who later became the head of the first orchestra of Russian folk instruments. And Shalyapin had a special tie with composer Sergei Rakhmaninov that withstood all trials and lasted for many decades. Rakhmaninov and Shalyapin were born only a month apart, and the composer outlived the singer by only five years. Perhaps another reason the two were so close is because both were destined to live in exile.

Shalyapin, Gorky & the USSR

Of Shalyapin’s many friendships, probably his closest was with the writer Maxim Gorky. Unfortunately, however, this friendship failed to withstand the test of time – a loss that Shalyapin regretted deeply until the end of his life. “Of the few losses and several ruptures of recent years,” he wrote, “... the loss of Gorky for me is one of the hardest and most painful.”

Shalyapin’s relationship with Gorky is a reflection of the singer’s ambivalent relationship with revolutionary Russia itself. Like Gorky, he sympathized with the victims of the 1905 Revolution – suffice it to remember how Shalyapin’s famous folk song Dubinushka became a protest against autocracy. And, on March 26, 1917, workers, soldiers and marines gave Shalyapin a standing ovation at a meeting concert in St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater when he came on stage holding a red flag and boomed in his powerful voice: “Take up arms, citizens, take up flags, down with the yoke of the greedy tyrants.” It was no accident that he was the first to be awarded the prestigious title of People’s Artist of the USSR.

However, as his relations with the Bolshevik regime soured, this title seemed more and more like a bargaining chip used to put pressure on him. Like Gorky, Shalyapin was at odds with the Bolsheviks over their brutal methods of putting down resistance from the aristocracy and, especially, the intelligentsia. At Gorky’s urging, Shalyapin and Gorky went together to the Bolshevik Ministry of Justice to protest against the savage slaughter of representatives of the liberal intelligentsia. “Gorky stood up as a defender of unjustly arrested people,” wrote Shalyapin. “He was suffering deeply, and I dare say he gave his soul to the victims of the revolution.”

In his book The Mask and the Soul, Shalyapin confirmed that Gorky approved of his decision to move abroad. Shalyapin did in fact leave the USSR on July 29, 1922 on a foreign tour, with the official permission of the government. But this time the “tour” lasted 16 years, until the singer’s death. Shalyapin travelled all around the world – to Europe, the United States, Canada, Latin America, to cities, towns and villages – but he never again set foot inside the Soviet Union.

For the first five years of this self-imposed exile, the Soviet press printed virtually no criticism of Shalyapin. But in 1927, poet Vladimir Mayakovksy launched an invective against him: “Should such artists come back here to live on Russian rubles, I would be the first to yell: Get out of here, you People’s Artist of the Republic!” In another notorious poem published in Komsomolskaya Pravda on June 2, 1927, Mayakovksy urged the authorities to “strip the ‘white barin’ [Ed: White nobleman] of the red laurel of ‘People’s Artist’.”

Mayakovksy, who by then was the official mouthpiece of Soviet Russia, only exposed in poetic form what the Soviet government felt. So what drew the ire of the “town crier of the revolution?” The story is a perfect illustration of the maxim that no good deed should go unpunished.

In 1927, Shalyapin, moved by the fate of the children of unemployed Russian emigres in Paris, had donated five thousand francs to a certain Father Georgy Spassky. Father Spassky published a thankful letter in the Paris emigre newspaper Resurrection, in which he stated that 1,000 francs of the said sum was given to the retired pre-revolutionary naval attache in Paris (which probably triggered accusations of Shalyapin “joining the anti-revolutionaries.”) A secret telegram was then sent from the Soviet embassy to the Kremlin, and the Soviet ambassador to France, Khristian Rakovsky, somewhat embarrassed, even called on Shalyapin to explain whether he had “donated money to a White Guards organization.” To which Shalyapin responded with dignity: “If I gave 5,000 francs to Father Spassky to help the Russian outcasts, that applied to children, and I do think it is hard to determine precisely which children are White and which are Red.”

In the meantime, anti-Shalyapin hysteria in Russia orchestrated by the All-Russian Union of Artists reached its peak, and on August 24, 1927, the Sovnarkom endorsed the decision of the All-Russian Union of Artists to strip Shalyapin of the title of People’s Artist. After this campaign, Shalyapin’s return to Russia was obviously out of the question: “I donated money to refugee children. If this is a crime, then I was also a criminal when, under the Imperial regime, I sang for the benefit of socialist revolutionaries ... I was called ‘People’s Artist,’ but when I helped starving Russian children, I drew ire ... I am indignant not at the fact that they stripped me of the title – I am not too ambitious for it – but at the fact that my act of goodness was interpreted as high treason ... This is an insult not only to me, but to all Russians.”

One may suppose that Shalyapin’s refusal to return to the USSR was due not just to what he called the “defamation campaign.” He who could not work in state theaters with the dictates of directors understood full well that we could not squeeze himself into the Procrustean bed of totalitarianism. “I am a free man and I want to live freely so that nobody can impose my convictions on me,” Shalyapin wrote. Indeed, one can hardly imagine him adapting his art to the confines of socialist realism. In addition, Shalyapin understood that, in returning to the Soviet Union, he could end up not in Gorky’s gilded cage, but in a cage of real iron – in a prison camp.

In The Mask and the Soul, Shalyapin acrimoniously recalled how, after the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian theater was buzzing “like flies with all sorts of revolutionary personalities.” One such personality, the revolutionary Kuklin, asked him to come up with something for the people, but later accused him of not “understanding the proletariat.” Shalyapin’s actor’s blood boiled: “How dare you talk to me like that?” – he raged. “Who are you that I can’t understand you? You piece of manure, I understand Shakespeare, and you are saying that I can’t understand you, bastard.”

Needless to say, Gorky’s attempt to convince Shalyapin to follow his example and come back to Soviet Russia fell through. In 1929, when Gorky was shuttling back and forth between Italy and Soviet Russia, the two met in Rome. Shalyapin recalled that Gorky “did not like” his refusal to return.

The relationship was ruptured altogether after Shalyapin filed a lawsuit against the Soviet Trade Mission in Paris after his book Pages from My Life ended up in Paris without his permission. Shalyapin maintained a lengthy correspondence with Gorky over the lawsuit, as Gorky had helped him to write the book. At one point, the latter wrote in an angry letter to Shalyapin: “This file will lay on your memory as a blemish, believe that not only Russians will condemn you mercilessly for your hunger for money.” (Shalyapin estimated the damage at 1 million francs). The final rupture of their relations came in January 1933. Back in Soviet Russia, Gorky wrote another letter to Shalyapin harshly criticizing the book in question.

Epilogue

In the end – after all his triumphs and disappointments – the great singer did return to his country. Upon the urgent request of Shalyapin’s children, his remains were transferred from Paris’ Batignoles Cemetery and buried on October 29, 1984 in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. And the words that composer Tikhon Khrennikov uttered at the burial are a true epitaph for Shalyapin: “The path of wandering which fell to Shalyapin’s lot many years ago is finally complete. His international glory was great, incomparable. Everywhere, in all corners of the planet, his name was and remains a synonym for artistic perfection and, at the same time, the embodiment of the limitless talent of the Russian people. Wherever he performed, however far fate carried him, everywhere Shalyapin saw himself as a messenger of Russian art and served its glory faithfully and passionately.” Shalyapin’s son Fyodor was also close to the truth when he wrote in the preface to the Soviet edition of The Mask and the Soul: “I know some blame him for having left... he left nowhere. He went with his people along the entire path that was destined for Shalyapin.” RL

Recordings of Shalyapin’s performances are available on CD from Musica Russica, phone 800-326-3132.