At this distance, it’s somewhat a matter of conjecture as to what went into this unfortunate encounter. Gatti-Casazza, who in the following season was to take the company’s reins from Hans Conried, later professed himself puzzled by the critical reaction to Chaliapin, who after all had already conquered La Scala (at Gatti’s invitation) in a chalIenging Italian role, winning over Boito, Toscanini, and the Milanese critics en route. But surely there was a strong “Not our class, dear” ingredient in the mix. Chaliapin’s ill-concealed attitudes toward the aesthetic indifference and frenetic dollar-chasing atmosphere of New York (while exacting a per-performance fee unprecedented “for a bass”) seems to have played a part. And it was at exactly this time that acting, though as yet uninfluenced by cameras and mikes, was beginning its uneasy transition from older vocally rhetorical styles to more conversational ones, from idealized physical modelings and presentational manners to more true-to-everyday-life ones. And here came Chaliapin, blowing in from the locally unfamiliar East with an unprecedented, inexplicably thrilling amalgam of all these practices. Over the preceding twenty years, New York critical tastes and criteria had been formed from various blends of Wagnerian high aspiration, eloquently presented Italian singing conventions, and a connoisseurship based on the grand-opéra advocacy of the De Reszkes, Plançon, et al., which was in those years still present in full bloom (though with a new generation of French and Frenchified artists) down at Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera Company. (Plançon, at least, without doubt a great and inimitable artist, was still on the scene at the Met, taking back his accustomed roles, including the Gounod Méphistophélès, as soon as Chaliapin cleared the port.) To all these cultivations, Chaliapin must have seemed rather gauche and a menace, one whose obvious genius threatened to strike beyond their boundaries to something more elemental. The New York music critics’ establishment of that time was a formidable one—Henry Krehbiel, W. J. Henderson, Richard Aldrich, Pitts Sanborn, et al. set a standard that has not been equalled since. But at this first meeting, they and Feodor failed to connect more than fitfully.

The June, 1908 Paris session(s) yielded five arias and three songs. Two of the arias are comedic, and make for an interesting comparison. The first is Farlaf’s boisterous rondo from Ruslan y Lyudmilla. It’s sung with tremendous energy and enough thrust to make the character potentially dangerous, but with moments of a lugubrious coloring (as at the end of the recitative, “stol’ slavny podvig,” or later at “Sladost’ mesti i lyubvi“) that let us know we’re dealing with a self-deluded doofus. This song also has streams of patter that evoke Rossini/Donizetti buffo practice, rendered with great deftness. The other comedic piece is Rossini—the first of Chaliapin’s four recordings of “La calunnia,” in Italian. This has the expected relish and vocal sturdiness and, already, several of the embellishments of phrase we would be forced to pronounce inadmissible were they not weirdly entertaining, along with his unique way of snaking through intervals with the aid of an invented-language sound somewhere between a “w” and the back-of-throat Russian “(y)”.^(I) Chaliapin rather hammers away at the piece (this improves on later versions), and we pick up a few clues as to what may have legitimately upset some of the New York critics a few months earlier.