With one more version of the Ruslan monologue, still piano-accompanied, Chaliapin’s recordings from the world of the Imperial Theatres reach their end. When we next hear from him, in the Hayes studio in October of 1921, he has left behind his beloved native country and all his material possessions to migrate to the West. From his first visits to Paris and Milan, he had remarked on the contrast between the vitality and individual freedoms of life in those cities and the restrictions and backwardness of what he found upon his return. Now, under the Soviets, he found these, the tightened controls on artistic opportunity, and the personally incompatible political atmosphere unbearable, and had just begun life and career anew, at forty-eight, in the West. His first recordings of this new life are of two Grieg songs, followed by another take on Solovey (my favorite one, and you have only to compare the opening phrases of it with the 1914 version to hear what I mean about the differences), and two orchestrally accompanied songs—his lifelong standby, Mussorgsky’s Song of the Flea, and the Rimsky-Korsakov/Pushkin The Prophet, with its harrowing tale of conversion and Kitezh-like visionary end. These selections disclose that the voice and temperament are still full of sap. Chaliapin the man has lost much, but Chaliapin the artist has lost nothing.

1921 was also the year of Chaliapin’s return to the Metropolitan with Boris, hailed now for what he was: a great singer and an actor who managed to unite the elocutionary tradition of 19th-Century Shakespearian tragedians with the modern realistic acting sensibility. He was to remain at the Met for seven years, in a very restricted repertory consisting of Boris and the Gounod/Boito devils (his Filippo in Don Carlo was highly praised, as was his Massenet Don Quichotte, but each production lasted only a single season) and with no great number of repetitions, but always to great acclaim. His studio sessions will from now on take place in HMV venues in London and Paris and the RCA Victor facilities in New York and Camden, and though they will continue to include folk and art-song material, until the last few years they will incline more to the opera excerpts that could be expected to sell in the huge markets of England, Western Europe, and North America. And, eager as we all are to get to the famous Covent Garden live performances and a thorough consideration of Chaliapin’s iconic achievement (that adjective, for once, used accurately), the title role of Boris Godunov, it would not be right to skim too lightly over the proliferation of studio recordings from the early ’20s, soon to embrace many replacements of earlier versions with new ones made by the electric system, trading in the horn for the mike and amplification.

Of the sides cut between 1921 and 1924, all of which find him still in a state of vocal plenitude, I will make one generalization by way of caveat: in the aria recordings of non-Russian extraction, the extramusical quirks that have been present in his recorded performances from the start become more pronounced. I think of them as propellants. The peculiar sonic consonant mentioned earlier; the aspirate h’s; the glottal catches; the laying-on of little plosive devices and splutterings that sometimes signal chuckles, sometimes sobs., etc.—all these are ways of goosing the musical progression onward. They are also ways of releasing the build-up of subglottal compression, and we must remain aware that, for all the suave phrasing and “on the breath” legato that Chaliapin repeatedly demonstrates, his “concentration” of tone (“Press down, you fool!”) is associated with such compression. And these devices have interpretive effects that are valid or not, according to taste, but which undeniably often come at the expense of the dignity and eloquence of sustained line and a more purely musical use of color and dynamics. A common way of objecting to them would be to say that he seems not to trust the music or his voice enough, and that since the music is (usually) wonderful, his voice magnificent, and his command of color and dynamics nonpareil, the embellishments at times seem unnecessary and faux-dramatic. They tend to sentimentalize the music, and once in a while carry a whiff of humbug. In the Russian arias and songs, he feels the need for them less, and they seem more naturally parts of the idiom when they do occur. I think this is what Sergei Levik (see the bibliographic note to Part One) meant when he said that once Chaliapin came West and lost touch with his Russian roots, his taste deteriorated. One must allow, of course, for the fact that Levik, whether by choice or not (unlike F. C., he had no great reputation to bring West with him, after all), remained in Russia and found a comfortable spot in the Soviet system. But hearing the Chaliapin oeuvre in historical progression forces one to at least take his point seriously.