In 1894, armed with a letter of introduction from Usatov, Chaliapin headed for Moscow. After a period that included a couple of unproductive performance experiences, but also some valuable instruction on acting from Mamont Dalsky of the Alexandrinsky Theatre, he obtained an engagement to sing Dr. Miracle in Les Contes d’Hoffmann in St. Petersburg. The production failed to draw an audience, but it did lead to an audition with the Maryinsky, and a contract. Borovsky has revised the impression, left in Chaliapin’s own recollections, of this first season with the Imperial Theatre as an unmitigated failure; the young bass in fact had a reasonable measure of success, and his contract was extended to the next year. He wasn’t happy, though. He hated the rigidity, the conventionality, the unquestioned acceptance of a “concert in costume” tradition, and the sense that bureaucratic affairs took precedence over artistic ones, that he found with the Maryinsky. Above all, he realized that he had not found the artistic identity he felt called to, and wasn’t apt to find it in the environment of the state theatre. That summer, in the company of a colleague, he headed North to Nizhny-Novgorod, home of a great fair where artistic enterprises of all descriptions were accommodated. There he met Savva Mamontov, railroad magnate and founder and sole proprietor of the most significant of the private opera companies in the Russia of these late Tsarist times. By the summer’s end and after a quarrelsome start to another year with the Maryinsky, Chaliapin had been induced to join this company for its regular winter season back in Moscow, and Mamontov had helped to pay the forfeiture-of-contract fee involved.

I will not do Mamontov any sort of justice here. But it’s rather as if Michael Bloomberg were a much greater aesthete than he is, with a broad literary knowledge, a fair degree of artistic talent of his own, and a deeply informed, perceptive appreciation of the visual arts, along with a vision for how all that might translate into a new kind of theatrical practice—and as if M.B. had decided to devote most of his billions to the realization of that vision. Accordingly, the Mamontov Circle had gathered to itself many of Russia’s leading theatrical and musical artists (Stanislavski had belonged, in his pre-Moscow Art Theatre days), painters, and writers, and the Private Opera had become the place where Russian opera first stood on its own feet, including the rescue from oblivion of Mussorgsky’s two masterpieces and the premieres or restorative revivals of several of Rimsky-Korsakov’s major works.^(I) From first meeting, Mamontov saw that Chaliapin could play a central role in this aspiration, and Chaliapin realized that he had found the milieu in which he could come into his own.