From the recording sessions of 1912, first in Milan and then back in St. Petersburg, emerges what turned out to be the most concentrated grouping of Italian arias he was ever to record. And they constitute for the most part a memento of what might have been, for though he’d sung a few Italian parts in Russian in his early years (Ferrando, Monterone, Ramfis, Oroveso, Colline, Tonio,^(I) and the utterly uncharacteristic Count Robinson in Cimarosa’s Matrimonio segreto)  Chaliapin undertook no Italian roles in the West except for Mefistofele, Don Basilio, Leporello, and Filippo. Indeed, he essayed no new roles at all after 1914, and during his decades in exile his repertoire was confined to the four above-named parts plus Boris, the Massenet Don Quichotte, an outing or two as Rimsky’s Salieri (see below), and of course the song literature he drew on for his many recitals.

If it’s a matter of observing anyone’s model of pure Italian style in these more representative arias of Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi (Mefistofele is, after all, something of an outlier), there’s no use pretending that these interpretations check all the boxes. When, following Chaliapin’s La Scala debut, a great tenor of the previous generation, Angelo Masini, wrote of his “Dantesque” Italian, he wasn’t referring to some perfection of the pronuncia, but to its omnivorous capaciousness, a way of forming words (in any language) that makes them sound carved from stone (and no doubt, in the case of Mefistofele, a built-in daemonic quality). You can hear it in the single word “Vieni” as Chaliapin launches the Lucrezia Borgia aria, and even more forcefully when he comes down the scale into the same word at the return to the opening statement. Or in the recitative before “Vi ravviso,” wherein each new sight (“Il mulino, il fonte, il bosco“) is an exciting rediscovery made vivid for us before “e vicin la fattoria”  brings the mood instantly down to that of the aria’s opening. There’s a second “La calunnia” here, more nuanced and specific, less hectoring, than the first; a noble profiling of “Ite sul colle” (Norma, the top E-naturals at “tremenda echeggerà”  flashing out in a way no “covered” approach could); and plenty of beautifully sustained legato line, with dulcet softer moments, in the Sonnambula and Ernani arias (though at one point in the latter, I’ve yet to figure out what he’s saying). So we can forgive, I think, some yanking about here and there, or an odd emphasis like “Qualunque si-YAH” as the Lucrezia cabaletta gets underway. And for brief flashes of a seldom-used florid capacity, listen to the cadenzas of the Sonnambula aria and of the cavatina in the Lucrezia double aria. The “Infelice” cadenza is terrific, too, and is not the default variation that is also the cadenza of the baritone’s “Il balen,” the tenor’s”Fra poco a me ricoverò,” and I don’t know what else. I should also emphasize that although they are sometimes more eloquently employed in the Russian repertory (where, naturally, everything came a trifle more easily) all the devices of bel canto vocalization—the bonded line, rubato, the messa di voce, and portamento that is never overused but always effectively executed when chosen—are always at Chaliapin’s disposal.