Here also is a second version of the Life for the Tsar monologue, but now orchestrally accompanied and better recorded, and including the splendid opening recitative. It’s a beautifully molded rendition, the legato closely knit and the timbre suggestive of the warm, velvety quality that those who heard him frequently commented upon, but which the recordings only intermittently capture. The same could be said of Nilakantha’s stanzas from Lakmé, a role Chaliapin sang in the early days, sung here in Russian. Do not expect by-the-score triplets on those upper turns, any more than you’d expect them from the great Italian baritones at the parallel spots in the Roi de Lahore aria; instead, succumb to the long-held E-flats at mp, the tender mezza-voce at the end of the first stanza, and the vibrant full-voice top Fs. The last of the arias is again from Ruslan, but it belongs to the title character, a role Chaliapin professed himself never satisfied with. And yes, I guess I’ll award first prize on this to the stupendous Mark Reizen on the 1938 Soviet set. Still, this is impressive singing.

Like the Russian folk songs from the Milan 1907 session, the three from Paris, 1908 have no instrumental accompaniment. In the first two, Dubinushka and the “Barge-Haulers’ Song,” the refrains are taken by members of the Moscow Bolshoi chorus. At this point in phonographic time, they sound more like a few of Feodor’s late-night boon companions (not inappropriate to the material), but after a couple of listenings, one realizes that the voices are actually strong, true, and in good balance. We might take note of the little glottal catches with which Chaliapin teasingly sets up the ascending lead-ins to the refrains of Dubinushka (on a different vowel each time); the tenory, shining timbre he brings to the “Barge-Haulers’ Song” (“Arise, Fair Sun”); and the extreme delicacy of the colorings in Luchinushka, including that captivating fil di voce double-p, which we’ll encounter often. (Someday soon, I will devote a post to what I call the “prismatic voice,” in which I’ll discuss the sources and uses of color in the fully-developed E-19 vocal structure. Here, I’ll note that in these folk-song arrangements, of which Chaliapin has left multiple versions, the colors, though they can be described in painterly terms he would not have rejected, never sound daubed-on. They arise not so much from word-meanings or illustrative phrasings in any one-to-one relationship, but from the moods, the emotional states, that underlie both. They sound improvisatory, like the color-play of the best jazz singers—except as voiced by a great instrument molded with no anticipation of a microphone, and thus possessing at once a more unified sound, yet a broader bandwidth of color. And one realizes that it was this folk-bred sense of coloristic response that Chaliapin brought to his portion of the operatic and art-song literature.)

Later in 1910, Chaliapin was back in Moscow, where three more recording sessions, resulting in sixteen sides, took place in August and September. Ten of these sides are of Russian folk material, most of which he was already recording for a second time, and since this pattern will be repeated, I will from this point forward condense my remarks on these recordings. This doesn’t mean, though, that they are not worth close attention. While I had heard some of them (my youthful collecting, naturally, centered on operatic selections), hearing them all in succession and repetition has added immeasurably to my love and appreciation of Chaliapin’s art. They disclose its sources, its native grounding, and give them their freest play. Michael Scott singles out Mashen’ka as exemplary; without disagreeing (Chaliapin toys gleefully with the insinuations of the song, and that final pp “A-a-h!” undergoes three or four transformations of shading as it sustains), I’d say that it’s Nochen’ka that most amazes me every time. In my notes on these songs, I observe that among the great singers of the acoustical era, he is, along with Caruso, the one who from the start most succeeded in putting emotion on the line, opening himself up without inhibition in the company of the horn and, I guess, Fred Gaisberg; that his sudden and radical changes of volume, timbre, and inflection, often taken to “character voice” limits, his alternately subtle and in-your-face feats of articulation—all achieved without departing from musical and dramatic continuity, and without ever disturbing the integrity of the voice—constitute a virtuosity fully equal to (though not the same as) that of the greatest florid vocalists. Even when the music itself is of slight interest (usually in composed “folk-like” pieces like Sokolov’s The Tempest Rages in the Fields or the excerpt from Serov’s Malevolent Power), the singer’s power to incorporate its gestures as parts of his own personality make them worth at least a hearing or two. The characterization is itself the point.