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.