Fedor Chaliapin Wikipedia Biography

Quotes [edit] I sometimes ask myself, why did the theater not only prejuded my attention to itself, but filled my whole being entirely? The explanation for this is simple. The reality that surrounded me contained very little positive. In the reality of my life, I saw gross deeds, I heard rude words. All this is naturally mixed with the life of every person, but the environment of the Kazan cloth settlement, in which fate was pleased to place me, was especially rude.

Maybe I did not understand this with my mind, did not realize this clear report in this, but, of course, somehow I felt it with all my heart. Deep in my soul, something inexplicable told me that the life that I see around is devoid of something. My first visit to the theater hit my whole creature precisely because obviously confirmed my vague foreboding that life could be a foreign - more beautiful, more noble.

In the moments of the greatest celebration in such a role as Boris Godunov, I feel only on the threshold of some mysterious and unattainable chambers. How long, what a long way! The largest talent will exhale without it, as the spring will stall in the desert, without breaking through the roads through the sands between these two facts there is a deep internal connection. After all, here Russian people sing a song from birth.

From the cradle, from the diaper. Always sing. At least, it was in the days of my adolescence. The people who suffered in the dark depths of life sang suffering and have funny songs to despair. What happened to him, that he forgot these songs and sang ditties, this depressing, this unbearable and mediocre vulgarity? Was he better to live in the world or, on the contrary, he lost all hope for the best and stuck in the interval between hope and despair on this damned damn bridge?

Isn’t the factory to blame whether the brilliant galoshes, is it a woolen scarf, for no reason, for no reason, enveloping the neck on a bright summer day when the birds sing so well? Is it not a corset worn on top of the dress with rural fashionistas? Or is it a damned German harmonica, which is kept under the mouse of a person of a workshop on a vacation day? I can’t explain this.

And how well they sang! They sang in the field, sang on hays, on rivers, near the streams, in the forests and behind Luchina. The Russian people were obsessed with a song, and the great song hops wandered in it, some kind of shoemakers are sitting and blowing vodka. Fly, they are bad. And suddenly they come in, my shoemakers come in, forget their abuse and fight, forget the severity of the fierce life to which they are sewn, as they throw a fulyar scarf from the shoulder on the shoulder, behind the absence of colors in the winter season, replacing a backbone, come in and sing.

The outer splendor of the first successes, the pleasant words of friends who came for the curtains to congratulate, the flowers and enthusiastic young ladies extinguish real burning and at the same time still interfere with the feel of the chad of the heads and soot. The young man loses the line of his own assessment and begins to rejoice that he is something wonderful in art. If, abroad, left at night alone with him and his conscience, he will doubt his exceptional value, then on another day some other wonderful well-wisher will pour a new glass of champagne into his soul.

The young artist is again intoxicated and forgot what he thought last night. And in school, when the teacher asks, but I don’t know, I make an idiotic face at home is my desire to steal a skirt from my mother, to put it on myself, to make a paper cap and a little to paint your face with a burned traffic jam and soot. Russia could not without the foundation be proud of them. It is not sacred, because the entrepreneur of these theaters was none other than the Russian emperor.

And this, of course, is not like an American millionaire, an English subscraber or a French businessman. The greatness of the Russian emperor - although he, perhaps, never thought about theaters - even through the bureaucracy was reflected in all the conduct of the case. First of all, the actors and in general all employees and servants of the imperial theaters were well provided.

The actor received a wide opportunity to live calmly, think and work. The settings of operas and ballet were grandiose. They did not count a penny there, they spent widely. The costumes and scenery were made so magnificent - especially in the Mariinsky Theater - that this could not have a private entrepreneur. However, it was rare even in the average provincial Russian theater, this is why, when you hear a first -class violinist, pianist or singer in Europe, you see a wonderful actor, dancer or dancer, these are very often artists of Russian education.

So the natural Muscovite passes indifferently past the Kremlin, and the Parisian does not notice the Louvre. In my youth and frivolity, I missed a lot in my life. Could I go deeper, closer and more passionate to approach Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy? Wouldn't I more often with emotion to look into the eyes of the bespectacled Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov?Wouldn’t I take a deep breath, seeing how dear Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, listening to his own stories in reading a Moskvin, coughing in a pound made of paper?

I saw, but did not breathe deeply. I think not. Neither in his lyrics, nor in his correspondence, there seems to be no instructions on this. So, he was not a musician, but how deeply he felt the very soul of music. All that he is in Mozart and Salieri speaks of music, in the highest degree completely. How deeply he felt Mozart - not only in his musical design, not only in his counterpoints or individual melodies and harmonic modulations.

No, he felt Mozart in his entire deep essence, in his substance. Nevertheless, if I even had the most remarkable voice in the world, then this would still not be enough to make the artistic impression that this stage figure required in this position.

So - I realized once and irrevocably - mathematical fidelity in music and the best voice is dead until mathematics and sound are spiritualized by feeling and imagination. This means that the art of singing is more than the brilliance of Bel Canto, I immediately understood the falsity of my intonation, blushed with shame, but at the same time was delighted that Dalsky said the word, consonant with my vague mood.

Intonation, coloring of the word - that's what it is! So, I’m right that I am dissatisfied with its “flea”, and, therefore, in the correctness of intonation, in the color of the word and phrases - all the power of singing. The Russian nature is wide, there is no dispute, but how many petty, meticulous, grumpy narrowness in the Russian life. The Russian heart is gifted with extreme tenderness, extreme pity, and how much at the same time in Russian life there is gross cruelty, painful mischief, sometimes just aimless, as if completely disinterested.

The Russian spirit is surprisingly sophisticated, and how much in Russian relationships of clumsy insane, and offensive suspicion, and rudeness, yes, really in good or bad, the Russian person does not know anything, nor in good or bad. I do not want to judge this and do not take it because I do not look at this as a politician or philosopher, but as an actor.

It seems to me, however, that if there is an opium in the church, then this is exactly the song. The sacred song, and perhaps not sacred, because it, the church song, lives inextricably and inseparably with that simple plain song that, like a bell, also shakes the dusk of life, but I personally, although it is not a religious person in the sense, as it is customary to understand this, always coming to the church and hearing “Christ is risen from the dead,” I feel as I am in charge.

I want to say that a short time I do not feel the earth, I stand in the air there is a motionless traditional canon, reminiscent of the decrepit, sclerous, all kinds of diseases of the obsessed old man living at the fence of the cemetery. It’s high time for this goutyer in the grave, and it tenaciously holds on to his meaningless, useless life and spreads a cadaveric smell around him.

I am not talking about this formal and harmful tradition. I mean the continuity of living elements of art, in which there are still many fruitful seeds. I cannot imagine the immaculate conception of new forms of art if they have life - flesh and spirit - then this life must necessarily have a genealogical connection with the past. In particular, I did not know what Lenin is.

In general, it seems to me that historical “figures” develop either when they are taken to the scaffold, or when they send other people to the scaffold. At that time, executions were carried out in private, so Lenin’s genius was to me, an absolutely ignorant policy, still much noticeable. Already about Trotsky I knew more. He walked around theaters and either from the gallery, then from the box threatened with fists and told the public a scornful tone: “On the streets, folk blood is pouring, and you, insensitive bourgeois, behave so low that you listen to the insignificant vulgarities that you spill mediocre actors” I remember his speech at the Mikhailovsky Theater.

The revolution, he said, is not a rowing, but a noble force, concentrated in the hands of the working people. This is a triumph of labor, an incentive moving the world. How these noble considerations differed from those speeches that were distributed in the same Mikhailovsky Theater, in squares and streets, from bloodthirsty calls to the defeat! Very soon I felt how disappointedly I looked at Gorky at developing events and at the nominating new figures of the revolution.

Seeing me, Sh. It seems that there was Zinoviev, an autocrat feudal feudal lord of the recently still brilliant northern capital. For a bowl of tea Sh.