Passionate stars of the Russian “tsarist bass”: how Fedor Chaliapin lived in two families

The personal life of the great Russian bass was full of passion and tenderness.

The future opera singer was distinguished by his loving nature from childhood. According to his own recollections, he was somehow expelled from school in his native Kazan for kissing a classmate. However, Fedor’s first serious passion was the Italian ballerina Iola Tornagi, whom he met when he was already playing in the private theater of businessman Savvy Mamontov.

Chaliapin left the Mariinsky Theater as a patron of the arts, and Tornaghi, who had already shone on the stages of Milan, Venice and Naples, came to Russia in 1896 at the personal invitation of Mamontov to perform with his theater at a fair. in Nizhny Novgorod. The meeting of the two artists became fateful, even though the love of two such different people seemed impossible at first glance.

Tornaghi was born in Monza into an aristocratic family. Her father was the Sicilian baron Ignazio Lo Presti and her mother was a ballerina. Baron’s family was not happy that the dancer became his chosen one, so the family soon broke up. Iola grew up with her grandmother while her mother earned her living by performing.

Chaliapin, on the other hand, came from a simple peasant family, studied shoemaking in his youth. His father, Ivan Chaliapin, was a hard-tempered man, and after drinking he became extremely hot-tempered and beat his wife and children.

Iola and Fedor were from completely different worlds, and the Italian was initially very cold towards the Russian singer, who fell in love with her at first sight. Moreover, they could not speak properly: Tornaghi did not know a word of Russian, and Chaliapin, of course, did not understand Italian. But in the end, the singer conquered the foreign ballerina with beautiful gestures and spread Russian souls.

Once, when Tornagi fell ill, he came to visit her with a whole pot of soup. And because he wanted to prove the sincerity of his feelings, he even changed the text in the opera “Eugene Onegin” at the rehearsal, singing “Onegin, I swear by the sword, I am madly in love with Tornagi!” instead of “Onegin, I’m not going to hide, I’m madly in love with Tatyana!”.

As a result, Iola’s heart trembled, and she was imbued with sympathy for “Il Basso,” as Chaliapin was nicknamed by the Italian guests because of his timbre.

The lovers married in the summer of 1898, when they were both 25 years old, in a small country church – the wedding was modest but very provocative.

“After the wedding, we had some funny Turkish feast: we sat on the floor, on the carpet, and played naughty like little boys. At weddings, there was nothing that was considered mandatory: neither a richly decorated table with various dishes, nor eloquent toasts, but there were many wild flowers and a lot of wine, ”Chaliapin himself recalled this ceremony.

Friends of the couple were not left behind: the next morning after the wedding night, the newlyweds were woken up by a terrible roar. It was Savva Mamontov and Sergei Rachmaninov who arranged an impromptu concert on pots and plates for Iola and Fyodor.

In the interests of family life, Iola left the stage. She had six children with Fedor. True, the firstborn of the couple, son Igor, died at the age of four in 1903. Then the first crisis in relations occurred. Three years later, Iola went to Milan to care for her sick mother. And at that time, a new passion for the widow of the brewery owner, Maria Petzold, flared up in the heart of Chaliapin, who was left alone.

Fyodor Chaliapin and Maria Petzold were both from Kazan, but fate wanted them to meet and get to know each other only in 1906 in Moscow. To this day, it is not known for sure how exactly the meeting took place – either they saw each other at the races, or they met at the house of industrialist Konstantin Ušakov.

Be that as it may, this meeting changed the lives of Chaliapin and Petzold – they will be together until the death of the singer.

From that moment on, Chaliapin began to live in essentially two houses: in Moscow with Iola, in St. Petersburg with Maria. Iola quickly understood that her husband had a lover, but she did not make scenes and for the sake of the children (and the youngest was barely a year old at the time) preferred to maintain the appearance of a normal family. She did it so well that the offspring did not know for a long time that their father had another wife. Maria had two children from a previous marriage, three more were born in the relationship with Chaliapin: daughters Martha, Marina and Dasia.

The measured life was broken by the revolution in 1917. In 1922, Chaliapin went into exile with his second family. At the same time, the singer did not cut ties with Iola – and continued to write to her from Europe, and before leaving he even turned to the authorities with a request that Iola and his children would not suffer from his emigration.

“I did not want to expose them to any difficulties in Moscow, and therefore I turned to Dzerzhinsky with a request not to draw hasty conclusions from any reports about me in the foreign press. Maybe there will be an enterprising reporter who will publish a sensational interview with me, but I never dreamed of that. Dzerzhinsky listened to me carefully and said: OK,'” Chaliapin recalled.

The divorce with Iola was finally formalized only in 1927, after which in the same year Chaliapin married Maria in one of the Russian churches in Prague during a separate tour.

A little more than 10 years was measured for a new stage in the life of the world-famous bass player. Chaliapin died of leukemia on April 12, 1938 in Maria’s arms. He was buried in Botignolles Cemetery in Paris. “Here rests Fyodor Chaliapin, a great son of the Russian land,” reads the inscription on the monument.

Iola Tornaghi remained in Russia. Already in her declining years, when the ballerina was very ill, her son Fedor took her to Rome. She died in 1965 at the age of 92.

By an amazing irony of fate, her rival Maria Petzold also came to Rome to die. She spent her last years near the Italian capital in her daughter’s house. Maria lived to be 82 and died in 1964.