most famous role
is Mefistofele. Leporello he sang for the first time in New York.
Basilio and Mephistopheles in _Faust_ he has probably enacted as often
in Russia as elsewhere. He "created" the title part of Massenet's _Don
Quichotte_ at Monte Carlo (Vanni Marcoux sang the role later in Paris).
With the Russian Opera Company, organized in connection with the Russian
Ballet by Serge de Diaghilew, Chaliapine has sung in London, Paris, and
other European capitals in Moussorgsky's _Boris Godunow_ and
_Khovanchina_, Rimsky-Korsakow's _Ivan the Terrible_ (originally called
_The Maid of Pskov_), and Borodine's _Prince Igor_, in which he appeared
both as Prince Galitzky and as the Tartar Chieftain. His repertoire
further includes Rubinstein's _Demon_, Rimsky-Korsakow's _Mozart and
Salieri_ (the role of Salieri), Glinka's _A Life for the Czar_,
Dargomijsky's _The Roussalka_, Rachmaninow's _Aleko_, and Gretchaninow's
_Dobrynia Nikitich_. This list is by no means complete.

I first saw Chaliapine on the stage in New York, where his original
ideas and tremendously vital personality ran counter to every tradition
of the Metropolitan Opera House. The professional writers about the
opera, as a whole, would have none of him. Even his magnificently
pictorial Mefistofele was condemned, and I think Pitts Sanborn was the
only man in a critic's chair--I was a reporter at this period and had no
opportunity for expressing my opinions in print--who appreciated his
Basilio at its true value, and _Il Barbiere_ is Sanborn's favourite
opera. His account of the proceedings makes good reading at this date. I
quote from the "New York Globe," December 13, 1907:

"The performance that was in open defiance of traditions, that was
glaringly and recklessly unorthodox, that set at naught the accepted
canons of good taste, but which justified itself by its overwhelming and
all-conquering good humour, was the Basilio of Mr. Chaliapine. With his
great natural stature increased by art to Brobdingnagian proportions, a
face that had gazed on the vodka at its blackest, and a cassock that may
be seen but not described, he presented a figure that might have been
imagined by the English Swift or the French Rabelais. It was no voice or
singing that made the audience re-demand the 'Calumny Song.' It was the
compelling drollery of those comedy hands. You may be assured,
persuaded, convinced that you want your Rossini straight or not at all.
But when you see the Chal