There follows three-and-a-half minutes at the opening of the Polish Scene, then four minutes or so of Kromy (in its intended position at the top of Act 4, not at the end of the opera), and finally almost all of the final scene, the only important omission being Pimen’s narrative. In the Farewell, there is again a marked expansion of the time frame relative to the studio recordings, and the wouldn’t-believe-it-if-I-hadn’t-heard-it confirmation that an audience is held rapt by what’s happening onstage, and that those incredibly soft, lingering pianissimi, always tensile, always conveying the awareness of things of great import held below them, actually sounding through the stilled air of a great opera house. It is the indelible mark at once of a genius of imagination, of a physicality of unsurpassed strength and suppleness, of a mastery of vocal technique, and of what the modern operatic sensibility was supposed to be about.

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Mini-bibliography (supplemental to the volumes noted at the end of Part One):

Chaliapin, Feodor: Pages from My Life (Katharine Wright, ed.; H. M. Buck, trans.), Harper & Bros., NYC, 1927.

Chaliapin, Feodor: Man and Mask (Phyllis Mégroz, trans.), Alfred A. Knopf, NYC, 1933.

Stanislavski, Konstantin: My Life in Art (Jean Benedetti, trans. & ed.), Routledge, London & NYC, 2008.

Rumyantsev, Pavel, and Stanislavski, Konstantin: Stanislavski on Opera (Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, trans. & ed.), Theatre Arts Books, NYC, 1975.

Grey, Ian: Boris Godunov/The Tragic Tsar, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NYC, 1973.

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NEXT TIME: The first of two installments on Siegfried of Siegfried, as disclosed by selected live recordings and by the current Met production.

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