In Opera as Opera I selected Chaliapin as my bass exemplar of what I term the “left-column singer,” that is, one whose voice can be described as bright, lean, and taut, as opposed to dark, plump, and loose, with the caveat that the best voices are capable of embracing all those qualities without displacement—that’s what makes them the best. Michael Scott draws an apt comparison between the remarkable coloristic range of Chaliapin’s voice with that of the supreme Italian baritone (another “Left Columnist”) Mattia Battistini, a comparison drawn earlier by Sergei Levik, who also points out that at times Battistini’s effects of color, ornamentation, and dynamics seem created for their own sakes, while Chaliapin’s always seem to be born of emotional expression. (Levik’s impressions of both artists, always acute, were formed primarily in live performance, seconded by recordings. The recordings rarely contradict his observations.) Chaliapin shares something else with Battistini, too: a relative weakness at the bottom of the voice type’s pitch range, more than compensated on the upper end by brilliance at full voice and nearly superhuman, pointillistic control at softer dynamics, never detached from “support,” always somewhere along the messa di voce continuum.

One enabling feature of Chaliapin’s technique that I think deserves more comment than it’s usually given is the gathering of open vowels on high notes in full voice. This is the quality the Italians call “raccolto,” quite different from “coperto” (“covered”), yet accomplishing the same end of keeping the voice from turning “open” or “spread.” No matter how aggressively he attacks an E or an F, the energy always feeds into this gathered adjustment, and stays there. This relates, I think, to the realization Chaliapin says he came to with respect to Usatov’s “press down, you fool”—that what was intended was a concentration of the tone. I am at times reminded almost of Lauritz Melchior’s treatment of the same pitches, which are at the very top of the bass’s range, but are directly on the passaggio into the upper range for the tenor. And we recall that Usatov was himself a tenor, perhaps passing along his way of singing these pitches with full energy without driving the tone into an overly broad set.

The very earliest Chaliapin sounds extant are taken from privately recorded wax cylinders. Of the seven presented here (three arias, or verses thereof, and four songs, in an Appendix on CD 13) I had previously heard four, on an O.A.S.I. LP, where they were dated from 1898. As we would expect, Marston’s, while unavoidably still primitive, are far more present to the ear, and although they are of interest only to document the fact that all the voice’s attributes and the man’s élan vital were already fully mobilized, they do accomplish that. Marston, less confident about the dates, assigns them to “between 1898 and 1901.”  From the two 1902 Hotel Continental sessions we have a total of eight sides. These are among the rarest of collectors’ rarities, made available from copies in the collection of Vladimir Gurvich and amalgamated from the best-sounding passages on each copy. To the best of my knowledge, I had never heard any of them before, and I was amazed to hear the voice pop out so fresh and unimpeded, so nearly complete in timbral qualities. (In general, for reasons of frequency response, low male voices suffered less than any others from the limitations of early recording methods. But to hear so much so early is certainly uncommon—even the piano’s tone is less attenuated than we’d expect.) The first versions of two arias are here (“Le veau d’or,” in Russian, and the final portion of Susanin’s Act IV monologue), in addition to six songs, three of which he did not record subsequently: Slonov’s “O thou, fair sun;” Korganov’s “Elegy” (not to be confused with Massenet’s “Élégie“); and Tchaikovsky’s “Disappointment.” All the Chaliapin tropes are in evidence, but I’ll save detailed examination of them for later, better-sounding versions, except to note that on the very first selection, Koenemann’s “When the King Went Forth to War”, he ends with a sustained E in a “connected” mezza-voce, not with his signature fil di voce pianissimo.