In this final installment of my consideration of Feodor Chaliapin’s collected recordings, I will be focusing primarily on the excerpts from live performances in London in the years 1926, ’27,  and ’28. This means that except for the studio recordings considered in relation to those events, I will be passing over many remarkable sides. These are for the most part remakes of songs and arias he had already recorded, in many cases more than once. I’m not going to generalize about them, except to say that though Chaliapin’s interpretations of most of these pieces did undergo some change, his voice aged very little in quality and technical reach till his final years, which means that the presence of the electrical recording process alone makes them desirable in pure listening-pleasure terms. Some of my old favorites, like the Death Scene from Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka or the magical mystery tour of the Rubinstein “Persian Song No. 9,” will, sadly, not receive discussion. But in the case of this prodigy of singingacting, I think the recordings that catch him doing that in the only place it can really happen, the theatre, must take pride of place.

The first of these occasions, the 1926 Covent Garden Mefistofele, received some attention in Part Two. The second yields the grouping of three monologues from what we would now call a “semi-staged” performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri, a chamber opera setting of one of three mini-dramas by Pushkin, each of which treats of one of the original sins. (The other two, The Stone Guest and The Covetous Knight, were set operatically by Dargomyzhsky and Rachmaninov, respectively.) The performance took place in the Royal Albert Hall on October 11, 1927, with the LSO under Lawrence Collingwood. This is an ingenious little piece, a witty commentary on envy predicated on the long-debunked legend of Salieri as Mozart’s murderer by poison. But at least for a non-Russian-speaking audience (and a connoisseur audience, at that), it justifies itself only in the presence of an extraordinary “actor who sings.” It’s set quite directly on the Pushkin text as Rimsky imagined it being declaimed by a great actor, and in fact he wrote out the entire vocal line before filling in any accompaniment, which for Rimsky is quite spare. So it will not satisfy lyrical cravings. Chaliapin “created” the role of Salieri (Mamontov’s Private Opera, 1898), with the reputedly remarkable character tenor and director Vasily Shkafer (frequently Chaliapin’s Shuisky) as Mozart. In these monologues, Chaliapin is obviously at the peak of what we might call his emotional/elocutionary/realism mode. But I would advise anyone approaching this material for the first time to 1) have at hand a complete libretto and/or a copy of Pushkin’s playlet, and 2) to familiarize him- or herself with the work via a complete recording (there have been several, but you won’t go wrong with the venerable Bolshoi version under Samuel Samosud, with two great artists, Mark Reizen and Ivan Kozlovsky, as the eponymous composers). Otherwise, these excerpts of what is essentially accompanied recitative, with nothing of the role of Mozart, the episode of the old fiddler, the offstage choral fragment from Mozart’s Requiem, etc., will have difficulty standing on their own, and the sudden flood of emotional pulsation in the orchestral peroration at the end (we pick up slight hints in sound of Chaliapin’s pantomime) will seem almost arbitrary.

As those of you on my blog announcement list know, I’ve been forced (well, not forced, but I don’t want to cheat the material) to postpone Chaliapin, Phenomenon: Part Three for one week. It will appear next Friday, Apr. 26. In our guise as publisher of Opera as Opera, we’ve had to cope with the bankruptcy of our long-established printer, a change of distributor (with no interruption to orders, fortunately), and associated issues—a drain on time and energy. More happily, I spent a couple of highly enjoyable and stimulating days to take part in a symposium hosted by Dean Fred Bronstein down at Peabody Institute, and to work a bit with some of the very talented students in the Opera Theatre class there. The symposium conversation was live-streamed, and will join the video archive of this ongoing series. I’m told it will take a couple of weeks to edit the video, but I will post a link to it on my media page and announce it here when it’s ready.

There were several interesting responses to my Samson et Dalila post of two weeks ago:

The first comes from David Stein, regarding the Samson highlights record with Risë Stevens, Jan Peerce, and the NBC Symphony conducted by Leopold Stokowski, originally an RCA Victor LP and now available on a Cala CD. I had noted that on the LP, Robert Merrill (as the High Priest) appeared only in the Act 3 “Gloire à Dagon” duet. But Mr. Stein informs us that on the simultaneously released 45-rpm version, the Act 2 scene between the High Priest and Dalila, beginning at “La victoire facile,” was included, and is on the Cala re-issue as well. That would make the CD, in any case recommendable for preservation of the exciting performance of the Bacchanale, even more desirable. Merrill was no great French stylist, but he did sing this part in the early ’50s, and one will surely not often hear it so handsomely vocalized.

While I’m at it—and since Chaliapin as Boris Godunov is coming up—I might mention also Stokowski’s disc of Boris extracts from the early ’50s. This is rather like some of the “symphonic synthesis” versions of operas (particularly Wagner’s) that Stokowski loved to cobble up, except that Boris’ big solo scenes are sung by Nicola Rossi-Lemeni, with incidental contributions from a couple of other singers. Rossi-Lemeni was a formidable singing-actor talent whose fine bass voice turned woolly all too soon. But this recording, done at the time of his San Francisco Opera debut in this role, caught him at his best, and is comparable to the splendid Filippo he sings on the Cetra Don Carlo. No, it isn’t Stokowski with the NBC, but the San Francisco Opera orchestra and chorus sound quite fine, and it is Stoki doing Rimsky. I have this performance on a Dell’Arte LP re-issue of the RCA Victor original, and I see from the old Myers & Hill Record Ratings that it, too, was issued in 45-rpm format—so perhaps some additional material lurks there. This, too, is available on Cala in its Stokowski Society series.

“Opera as Opera” news: two more thorough and supportive reviews are in. One is by Nils-Goeran Olve in the March issue of the dear old The Record Collector, and the other by Paul–André Demierre in Crescendo Magazine (www.crescendo-magazine.be). It will be a few days before we get some pull quotes on the “Opera as Opera” page, and Mr. Demierre’s piece is in French. But in the meantime we’ll rest the case with his concluding line: ‘”Opera as Opera’: une bible!”

Is Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila a great opera? Bearing in mind that though any opera exists only in performance, and so the answer always depends on tonight’s realities, we still learn through experience of any given work that it does or does not have the possibility of being great tonight, and on that basis name it “great” or not. And in that sense most of us would say that if our standard of greatness is Otello or Tristan und Isolde or Don Giovanni, Samson falls short; it’s not a great opera. But it is a good one, which if well performed can be exciting, entertaining, even moving. That makes it a legitimate canonical repertory piece, and if our gauge isn’t the best of Verdi or Wagner or Mozart, but whichever we deem the best of the new operas the Met has brought us over the past half-century, Samson miraculously ascends to greatness. We’d have to go back to Peter Grimes to sensibly argue the relative merits. That’s why the canon is a canon, the repertory a repertory.

One of the things I love about Samson is its orchestral palette. Even those who condescend to Saint-Saëns have to concede his almost Rimsky-esque expertise as colorist. I suppose he can sometimes be accused of splashing color around to conceal an absence of musical substance, but in his best big work, like the Third Symphony and Samson, where the structures are firm and the melodic or thematic ideas consistently engaging, that isn’t at all the case, and from Samson’s brassy call to arms to the undulating breezes of the Valley of Sorek, the cracking of the storm, the groan of the mill wheel and the fizzy, tinselly tints of the Temple of Dagon, the theatrical descriptiveness of the score is consistently captivating.

Not on the night, however, specifically the night of March 13, and that’s where my complaints begin. (Yes, the production is new this season. Musical and vocal things first, however.) The conductor was Sir Mark Elder, about whom I’ve blown warm and cool, never hot or cold, over the years. My reservations about him have often centered around tempo, at times not merely slow, but lumbering. On this occasion, these seemed to me perfectly all right, or would have been if possessed of more inner animation and outer presence. But those were lacking (in basic sonic terms, the music was underplayed), and the color range never got beyond Easter Egg pastels. Then there’s this: though there is plenty in the way of upper-midrange interplay for the woodwinds, sorties for trumpet, plinks for xylophone, plonks and sweeps for the harp, and taps for the cymbal, much of Samson is built from the bottom. This is especially true in Act 1, which is with some reason considered the easiest to let die, and is as true of the extensive choral writing as of the orchestra. Low-string sonority, which Yannick Nezet-Séguin has promised to make a priority (see the Pelléas post, 2/12/19) is part of what’s involved here. The other part is attack. A few instances from Act 1: the entrance of the choral basses at “Nous avons vu nos cités renversées” (allegro non troppo, with strong accenting in the orchestra—the beginning of a section that stacks the choirs’ entrances in ascending order for what a long-ago colleague of mine, nose crinkling, called “Biblical Counterpoint”); the angular motive that introduces Abimélech and underpins the first part of his episode; the churning staccato figure, ff, pesante, that launches the High Priest’s “Maudite à jamais la race“; and, after the prelude to Act 2, the propulsive, low-to-high intro to Dalila’s recitative that precedes “Amour, viens aider.” All these had nothing like the needed presence and punch. Nor was there compensation for this dearth in the higher, lighter regions: the lilting Act 1 Dance of Dagon’s Priestesses, for example, which can have considerable charm, was given no lift or pulse. From beginning to end, Elder led as if considering the music of no dramatic significance, just a layer of frosting without the cake. So the orchestra coasted along, patting the music on its primped-up head. Unlike the pit orchestras of times gone by, this one won’t go to the dramatic gesture unless pushed to do so. It will also not return to its designated chairs in the pit until good and ready to do that—this was yet another evening in which the whole house above orchestra level was given the distraction of not a few players making their way unconcernedly back (from intermission downtime, not offstage assignments) after the music had started. It’s insulting.