Passions of the Russian “Tsar 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 memories, he was somehow expelled from a school in his hometown of Kazan for kissing a classmate. However, Fedor’s first serious passion was the Italian ballerina Iola Tornagi, whom he met when he was already performing at the private theater of entrepreneur Savva Mamontov.

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

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

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

Iola and Fedor came from completely different worlds, and the Italian was at first very cold with the Russian singer, who fell in love with her at first sight. Moreover, they couldn’t really speak: Tornaghi didn’t know a word of Russian, and Chaliapin, of course, didn’t understand Italian. But the singer finally conquered the foreign ballerina with beautiful gestures and the breadth of the Russian soul.

Once, when Tornagi fell ill, he came to visit her with an entire pot of soup. And wanting to prove the sincerity of his feelings, during the rehearsal he even changed the text of the opera “Eugene Onegin”, singing “Onegin, I swear on the sword, I am madly in love with Tornagi!” instead of “Onegin, I won’t hide, I’m madly in love with Tatiana!”.

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 the timbre.

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

“After the wedding, we had a kind of fun Turkish party: we sat on the floor, on carpets and played bad guys like little guys. There was nothing that was considered obligatory at weddings: neither a richly decorated table with a variety of dishes, nor eloquent toasts, but there were plenty of wildflowers and plenty of wine,” Chaliapin himself recalled. even during this ceremony.

The couple’s friends are not left out: the next morning after the wedding night, the newlyweds are awakened by a terrible roar. It was Savva Mamontov and Sergei Rachmaninoff who arranged for Iola and Fyodor an impromptu concert on pots and plates.

For reasons of family life, Iola left the stage. She and Fedor had six children. True, the couple’s firstborn, son Igor, died at the age of four in 1903. Then there was the first crisis in relations. Three years later, Iola leaves for Milan to take care of her sick mother. And at this time a new passion arose in the heart of Chaliapin, left alone, for the widow of the owner of the brewery, Maria Petzold.

Fyodor Chaliapin and Maria Petzold were both from Kazan, but fate wanted them to meet and know each other only in 1906 in Moscow. It is still unclear exactly how the meeting turned out – either they saw each other at the races, or they met in the house of industrialist Konstantin Ushakov.

Anyway, this meeting changed the life of Chaliapin and Petzold – they will be together until the death of the singer.

From that moment Chaliapin basically began to live in two houses: in Moscow with Iola, in St. Petersburg with Maria. Iola soon realized that her husband had a mistress, but she did not roll backstage and preferred to maintain the appearance of a normal family for the sake of the children (and the youngest then barely had a year). 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, in a relationship with Chaliapin, three more were born: daughters Martha, Marina and Dasia.

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

“I didn’t want to expose them to trouble in Moscow, so I approached Dzerzhinsky, asking him not to jump to conclusions from any reports about me in the foreign press. Maybe there will be an enterprising journalist who will publish a sensational interview with me, but I never dreamed of it. Dzerzhinsky listened to me carefully and said: Good,” Chaliapin recalls.

Iola’s divorce was not finally formalized until 1927, after which, in the same year, Chaliapin married Maria in one of the Russian churches in Prague during a solo tour.

Just over 10 years have passed for a new stage in the life of the world famous bass. Chaliapin died of leukemia on April 12, 1938 in Maria’s arms. He is buried in the Botignolles cemetery in Paris. “Here lies Fyodor Chaliapin, the brilliant 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 often ill, her son Fedor took her to Rome. She died in 1965 at the age of 92.

By an astonishing 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.