What I think is necessary to understand is that Chaliapin’s route into his unique self was through the theatre. He considered himself “an actor who sings,” and everything we hear on his records by way of musical and vocal expression was arrived at not as a series of choices about how to render this or that effect of dynamics, of tempo, of shading, or how to execute certain technical feats, but through his search for the character he was embodying. He felt with all the considerable force of his being that if he found his own way into the character in all its fullness, internal and external, its vocal expression would come as an urgent, precise, and inevitable (or—to use the term in its original, honorable meaning) “organic” thing, which he spoke of as “the inflection of the voice.” Mamontov understood that while his young phenomenon needed guidance in certain areas (was, in fact, hungry for it), this passionate search for his own way, if at once cultivated and given ample breathing room, would lead to something extraordinary and original. So it did, and while the emergence of this new species of operatic artist was met with incomprehension or opposition from some, it swept audiences away, and was from the beginning recognized for what it was by the most discerning Russian critics (e.g., Vasily Stassov and Yuri Engel).

All this explains why Stanislavski placed Chaliapin at the very summit, as the operatic analogue of such actors as Duse, Yermolova, and Salvini, and why Chaliapin is to this day revered by theatre artists (at least the historically curious minority of them) who believe in working “from the inside out.” Yet he is also considered a paradigm by those who find the key in a technique based on training in the externals. Meyerhold himself, sprung from the Moscow Art Theatre to develop his brilliant company trained in “biomechanics,” took Chaliapin as a great exemplar of an actor who works “correctly—from the outside in.” And much of Chaliapin’s search for character was through meticulous, obsessive attention to what we normally think of as “externals.”

As I noted two posts ago in relation to the character of Otello, we used to have this stuff called makeup. Through Mamontov, Chaliapin developed a penetrating eye for art. Such painters as Vrubel (whom Mamontov championed, against the prevailing taste), Korovin, Serov, Repin, and others were either in the Mamontov Circle or in close proximity to it. They designed sets and costumes, they painted striking interpretations of the historical and legendary figures that were Chaliapin’s characters (and of Chaliapin as those characters), and in some cases actually collaborated with him on devising his makeup and costumes. It became Chaliapin’s habit to arrive at the theatre hours before performance time, hours spent at his table, slowly feeling his way into his character’s way of being as he carried the detailing deeper and approaching what he called the “inner makeup” of the role. One has only to glimpse at the photos of his handiwork (all his own) as Boris Godunov or Galitzky, as Serov’s Holofernes or Dargomizhsky’s Miller, or at the contrast between his Méphistophélès at the Maryinsky in 1895 and the same character at Mamontov’s Opera two years later (influenced by Vrubel) to see the mastery he acquired of visual representation. United with this was the remarkable power and shape of his physical action. Always tall, but when young undernourished and skinny, he had grown into a strong, flexible physicality that responded to expressive demands with what we might call an “inflection of the body,” from which the “inflection of the voice” naturally emerged. All who saw him testified not only to the dominance of his physical presence, but to the suppleness and grace of his movement.