Fred Gaisberg was a bold American kid who, first as an accompanist, then soon as what we would now recognize as a combination A&R executive, advance man, and producer, got in on the ground floor of the recording industry in the 1890s and became a foundational presence therein. He recollects that when he set up his primitive apparatus in a room of the Continental Hotel, Moscow, in January of 1902 (just four months before he would do the same for Caruso  in the Grand Hotel, Milan) to record Chaliapin’s first 10-inch, Red Label sides for the Gramophone & Typewriter Company, the bass was already, at not quite twenty-nine, a mature artist and a culture hero (far beyond what we now think of as a “celebrity”) in his home country. And though Chaliapin remained a searching, self-reinventing artist all his life, that status (star of both the Bolshoi and Maryinsky Imperial Theatres, folk ikon) was already a  remarkable enough accomplishment. He’d been born a peasant (an official identity) in a settlement of small wooden houses outside Kazan, where he had some elementary schooling to which he paid faint attention. Apprenticed first to a cobbler and then a wood turner and beaten “mercilessly” by both, then taken into the clerical firm of his father, a payday drunk who also beat both son and wife, he lived a childhood surrounded by poverty, thievery, and violence. He did happen into the local church choir, thereby discovering the pleasure and solace of singing, and acquiring the beginnings of musical literacy.

He was soon seized upon by the theatre, first for its power to remove him, as spectator, from the wretched circumstances of his life, then for the permission it gave him, as aspirant, to become another person. Through his demonstrations of sheer desire and willingness to do anything needed, he attached himself to provincial companies and regional touring troupes in Kazan, in Ufa, and finally Tiflis. These companies came and went, performing operas, operettas, and in some cases plays. Chaliapin was still in his mid-teens when he sang his first solo operatic roles of any significance, The Stranger in Verstovsky’s Askold’s Tomb (the big narrative with chorus is a scene he later recorded) and Ferrando in Il Trovatore, and still not twenty when he assumed the parts of Brogni (La Juive), Oroveso (Norma), and Valentin (Faust) in Tiflis. That company promptly folded, leaving the young singer unemployed, malnourished, and beset by extremely dark thoughts.

But Tiflis was where a recently retired tenor of enough attainment to have sung leading roles at the Moscow Bolshoi, D. A. Usatov, had set up his teaching practice. On the verge of leaving town, Chaliapin presented himself at Usatov’s doorstep and sang for him. The year that Chaliapin spent with the tenor, whom we gather was a thoroughly cultivated artist, was formative in many ways, for Usatov in effect took him in, not only giving him free voice lessons, but providing him with an environment in which he acquired a wider range of musical awareness (including his first encounters with the music of Mussorgsky) and fresh coats of cultural and social polish. Indeed, vocal technique may almost have been the least of it, though it’s hard to tell. Chaliapin’s voice already possessed the range, power, and quality to have sung major roles, and what we learn of Usatov’s methods is, except for an admonition to “Press down, you fool,” minimal and generic. Chaliapin later referred to “a tendency to the mechanical” in Usatov’s teaching, from which I infer that, like many teachers, he had set sequences of exercises that he applied, with appropriate transpositions, to all voices. It could also have meant, though, that Usatov attempted to address the functional workings of the voice, in which case there would have been relatively little to do with a pupil like Chaliapin. This certainly doesn’t mean that Usatov did not have an important influence. But my educated guess is that most of it fell into the areas of phrasing, musicianship, and stylistic awareness. Chaliapin’s year with him constituted his only period of sustained vocal study. ^(I)