Feodor Chaliapin - Later Life

Later Life

Chaliapin toured Australia in 1926, giving a series of recitals which were highly acclaimed. Privately, Chaliapin's personal affairs were in a state of disarray as a consequence of the Russian Revolution of 1917. At first he was treated as a revered artist of the newly-emerged Soviet Russia. However, the harsh realities of everyday life under the new regime, and the unstable climate which followed due to the ensuing Civil War, combined with, reportedly, the encroachment on some of his property by the Communist authorities, caused him to remain perpetually outside Russia after 1921. He still maintained, however, that he was not anti-Soviet. Chaliapin initially moved to Finland and later lived in France. Cosmopolitan Paris, with its significant Russian émigré population, became his base, and ultimately, the city of his death. He was renowned for his larger-than-life carousing during this period, but he never sacrificed his dedication to his art.

Chaliapin's attachment to Paris did not prevent him from pursuing an international operatic and concert career in England, the United States, and further afield. His most famous part was the title role of Boris Godunov (excerpts of which he recorded 1929-31 and earlier). He is remembered also for his impersonations of Ivan the Terrible in Rimsky-Korsakov's The Maid of Pskov, Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust, Don Quixote in Massenet's Don Quichotte, King Philip in Verdi's Don Carlos and Bertram in Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable.

Largely owing to his advocacy, Russian operas such as Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, Glinka's Ivan Susanin, Borodin's Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride and Sadko, became well-known in the West.

Chaliapin made one sound film for the director G. W. Pabst, the 1933 Adventures of Don Quixote. The film was made in three different versions - French, English, and German, as was sometimes the prevailing custom. Chaliapin starred in all three versions, each of which used the same script, sets, and costumes, but different supporting casts. The English and the French versions are the most often seen, and both were released in May 2006 on a DVD. Pabst's film was not a version of the Massenet opera but a dramatic adaptation of Cervantes' novel, with music and songs by Jacques Ibert.

In 1932, Chaliapin published a memoir, Man and Mask: Forty Years in the Life of a Singer. Chaliapin's last stage performance took place at the Monte Carlo Opera in 1937, as Boris. He died the following year of leukemia, aged 65, in Paris, where he was interred. In 1984, his remains were transferred from Paris to Moscow in an elaborate ceremony. They were re-buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery.

One of his sons, Feodor Chaliapin, Jr. (1905–1992), had a notable career in Western motion pictures as a character actor, appearing most famously in Moonstruck and in The Name of the Rose opposite Sean Connery. Another son, Boris Chaliapin, was a well-known artist, having painted the portraits used on 414 covers of the mass-circulation news magazine Time between 1942 and 1970.