These Moscow sessions also yielded two Faust excerpts—the Garden Scene Invocation and the first half of the Church Scene, in which his partner is the fine lyric soprano Maria Michailova. I’ll save remarks on Chaliapin’s Gounod devil for further along, except to note that these extracts are in Russian, which in itself transforms their effect; that, without any chorus present, Chaliapin backs off-horn and sings the demons’ “Margarita! Margarita!” himself^(I); and that he evades the low G at “To prestola Ego” (“Dieu tout à la fois“). Here also is Chaliapin’s first recording of Filippo’s monologue (Don Carlo), beginning at “Dormirò sol.” It’s one of his least satisfactory recordings. He adopts an oddly open, spare vowel formation in the p opening phrases that avoids the muzzy cupo timbre of some Italian bassos, but that sounds at once tentative and raw in his voice, painfully so on the mezza voce D’s at “sotto la volta nera,” and for once his emotional significations don’t sound “organic.” But the ending is stupendous.

There soon follows, though, one of Chaliapin’s greatest records, of Pimen’s Act One monologue from Boris Godunov. From the opening words, we are aware of a different sort of person from any of those he has brought before us—one of infinite gravity and patience, old but still fully in command of his powers, who, as his lamp gutters, approaches the end of his great mission as chronicler. If we have been listening to the brilliantly ringing, varicolored high bass of his other recordings, we are startled by the depth and darkness of tone we hear, and then the consistency with which it rolls through the music, giving and taking with the dynamics and setting forth the words with bardic clarity and purpose, but making remarkably little use of the devices of characterization he customarily deploys. (I’m reminded of W.C. Fields’ definition of a gentleman: “Someone who knows how to play the saxophone, but doesn’t.”) And that is clearly Chaliapin’s intent: Pimen wouldn’t do any of that, he would never embellish, but simply tell the story, filled with its importance. To follow through the monologue with this coloration, with ease and no hint of its being anything other than his normal vocality, is not only a stroke of interpretive imagination, but of technical mastery as well—and I’d like to emphasize this last point, because many listeners may not recognize it as a technical achievement. I would suppose this was the vocal set of Chaliapin’s Dosifei, of which we have nothing on his recordings.

Over in St. Petersburg a year later (Chaliapin was performing at both the Imperial Theatres during these years) there were three more recording dates. They produced his early versions of Boris’ Farewell and Death, of Varlaam’s raucous song about the siege of Kazan, and the two Rubinstein Demon arias, plus songs. Again I’ll delay any detailed responses for the later versions, possibly referring back to these, while noting that Chaliapin did at one point or another sing all three Boris bass roles, and that according to his own accounts it was the Inn Scene, with the wandering monk Varlaam, and not any of Boris’ scenes,  that first awakened him to the unique qualities of Mussorgsky and of his native Russian opera. And again we come to Pimen, the Act IV tale this time, and again are astonished at the beauty and rightness of the sung narration.