“It is devoted to the 137th birth anniversary of our fellow man, Fyodor Chaliapin. By tradition, it began with a premiere at the Musa Dzhalil Tatar Opera and Ballet Theatre,” theatre Director Raufal Mukhametzyanov told Itar-Tass.

The festival of music opened at the theatre with a premiere of Puccini’ s Madame Butterfly. The programme also includes Puccini’s opera La Boheme, Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades, Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride, and Verdi's Rigoletto, Aida, La Traviata, and Trovatore.

“By tradition, the festival will bring together a splendid team of about 40 participants,” Mukhametzyanov said. These include prominent soloists from the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Theatres, singers from Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, the United States, Ukraine, and Sweden. The programme includes Russian and foreign classical works, which were brilliantly performed by Chaliapin in his days. The festival will end on February 21 and 22 with gala concerts.

The Chaliapin Festival was founded in Kazan in 1982. It is a unique event in the history of modern Russian music theatre. The first festival took place in Kazan in 1982 as a republican festival. It became a nationwide festival in 1985 and international in 1991.

During the previous celebrations Chaliapin’s voice filled the streets of Kazan. The loudspeakers, installed in the central part of the city near the monument to the renowned fellow citizen opened in 1999, reproduced the voice of the great singer for the residents of Kazan and its guests. They laid flowers at the monument to the accompaniment of his arias from the Boris Godunov, Ivan Susanin, Mermaid, and Maid of Pskov operas.

A religious service was held for the singer in Kazan's Epiphany Cathedral where he had been baptised. A chapel in memory of Fyodor Chaliapin was opened in the belfry of the cathedral that had been founded in 1831.

The Kazan Literary Museum named after Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, where a memorial room of his closest friend has been created, hosts February Chaliapin Evenings. One of such evening was reserved for a meeting with Chaliapin researcher Nikolai Gorbunov, the author of the book “Fyodor Chaliapin in Japan and China”. An Itar-Tass international affairs journalist for the first time presented his new work called “Along Chaliapin's Scandinavian Trail”.

The restaurant of the Hotel Chaliapin offered the singer's favourable meals: cold-smoked salmon with ginger and horseradish, sterlet soup, and Russian dumplings with fresh and smoked salmon, Rouen duck made from the duck's breast with the chicken's liver and bacon, seasoned with pineapple sauce.

Chaliapin was born on February 1, old style, and was baptised on the following day known as the Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple. With his great voice having been blessed, the singer glorified Russia with his talent around the world. Singer and drama actor Fyodor Chaliapin (1873-1938) was born into a peasant family in Kazan. At the age of 12 he began appearing in drama performances, starting as an extra. In 1894 he sang in the productions at St. Petersburg's Arcadia garden and from 1896 in Moscow's Savva Mamontov private opera. In 1899, Chliapin became a soloist of the Bolshoi and Mariinsky Theatres and performed in Russia and abroad, including La Scala in Milan, Rome, Monte Carlo, Berlin, New York, and Paris. Cosmopolitan Paris, with its significant Russian emigre population, became his base, and ultimately, the city of his death. He was renowned for his larger-than-life carousing during this period - but he never sacrificed his dedication to his art.

Chaliapin's last stage performance took place at the Monte Carlo Opera in 1937, as Boris.

In 1932, Chaliapin published a memoir, "Man and Mask: Forty Years in the Life of a Singer", prepared in collaboration with Soviet writer Maxim Gorky. He died the following year of leukemia at the age of 65 in Paris, where he was interred. In 1984, his remains were transferred from Paris to Moscow with elaborate ceremony. They were re-buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery.