This week, instead of leading with more news about Opera as Opera developments (it’s going well), I’d like to pass along a little nudge about Will Crutchfield’s ongoing series of superbly annotated ancient-vocal-recording posts, “Will’s Record of the Week.” He will now be developing a mailing list for those who would like to subscribe and receive notifications. I strongly recommend.  Here’s the link.  

The most important event, artistically speaking, of the 2018-19 opera season so far has been the release of Feodor Chaliapin/The Complete Recordings on the Marston label. The 13-CD box contains every side and cylinder, published and unpublished, that Chaliapin is known to have recorded. In terms of sound restoration and pitch verification, Ward Marston has met, if not transcended, his own loving and scrupulous example, and in terms of packaging, presentation, and documentation has outdone even the finest of the earlier CD and LP hommages to this mightiest of singingacting exemplars.

In one of the essays included in the release’s handsome, copiously illustrated hardbound book, Michael Scott (in collated excerpts from his The Record of Singing) says: “Chaliapin ranks with Caruso and Maria Callas as one of the greatest singers and most potent and influential operatic artists of the twentieth century,” and he goes on to note that in one respect he surpassed the other two, for he achieved his dominance without the natural claim of higher-ranged voices on public attention and affection. Such evaluations are automatically open to dispute, and the accomplishments of these three artists (and of so many others–Ponselle? Melchior? Flagstad?, etc.) are so unalike in crucial ways as to foreclose any sensible comparison. Still, I might have picked Caruso and Callas for that purpose myself, at least with regard to influence, and I might have taken Scott’s observation one step further. Caruso was a very great singer, a musically instinctive and sophisticated interpreter, and an irresistible performing personality who eventually gained respect as an actor, but he was nothing like the pioneer of total singingacting transformation that Chaliapin became. Those two share common ground as contemporaries, as heroic, man-in-full males, and trailblazers in their respective vocalities. Callas, also heroic but two generations advanced into her art’s creative decline, was a trailblazer to the past. Her vocal prime, during which she was supreme in music of such different characteristics than the men’s, lasted less than a decade. Chaliapin’s endured for forty years, and ended only with his final illness.

My consideration of the Compleat Chaliapin will require two posts, and will proceed chronologically through the recorded oeuvre. Today’s will cover less of that ground than the next installment, because it will try to get some sort of handle on how Chaliapin became Chaliapin. That is perhaps the most remarkable of all the stories I know of the fulfillment of artistic potential. For although (such worthies as Thomas A. Edison and Malcolm Gladwell to the contrary notwithstanding) talent—and particularly talent at the exponential, “genius” level— is by no means overrated, it is also rare for any degree of talent to reach such full development, and against so formidable an array of obstacles as to make it appear that the obstacles were necessary to the development.