“Me-e-e-e voi—ci.” Picture big, fat coronas over each syllable, and an aural impression of a large, genial, but rather overbearing fellow stretching them out as he walks toward us, and you’ll have some notion of Chaliapin’s arrival as Méphistophélès. And as you proceed through these excerpts, you’ll quickly realize that you’re in for a free-for-all, Mephisto as a collection of Improvisations, Improvements, Conveniences, and Variations on Themes by Gounod. Some of these, covering a range from the naturalistically conversational to the high-flown rhetorical, are original and marvelous; others sound merely self-indulgent, or as if born from an awareness that the writing will not support the natural temperamental inclinations of the singer. The writing’s fulfillment most often lies in quite another direction, but the singer’s response is to push ever further in his own. Chaliapin had of course sung this part in Russian early on, but whereas he had his cosmic imaginings, literary inspirations, “sculptural” physicality, “Dantesque” Italian, and Sergei Rachmaninov as coach to help him prepare for Boito’s version of this devil, he evidently found no one to aid him in adapting his outsize gifts to this musical and linguistic idiom. (Wasn’t someone like Henri Busser around? Or: Chaliapin Meets Reynaldo Hahn?)

My colleague Matthew Gurewitsch has sent along an amusing transcription of Chaliapin’s rewrite of the Garden Scene Invocation, as heard here. It includes the substitution of “Allons!” for “C’est bien” (destroying the rhyme with “entretiens“) and, at the close, a cramming together of “Marguerite” (making it into a four-syllable grouping of 16th notes on the G), then a quick breath before singing something that sounds like “Ô rage!” (or “orage“, as if summoning a storm?—neither makes the slightest sense) on the (very prolonged) C that usually bears the “ri” of our heroine’s name. Matthew wonders if this weirdness could possibly be in some old-timey performance tradition? No, it’s just F. C. wanting to wipe us out with the Satanic orotundity of his “a” on that C. Which, to be sure, he does, and I mustn’t let these observations pass without noting that all the shenanigans, good and bad, are rendered with a salivating relish and with one of the great voices to ever undertake the role. Still: the proliferation of distended note values, altered rhythmic patterns, rewritten words, and sloughed-off French is beyond any accounting method I know of, and in some instances has taken me aback. While it’s always been clear that Chaliapin was not entirely comfortable with the French language and rules of lyrical rhetoric (e.g., even his late recording of Massenet’s Élégie, while breathtaking, is also still in Russian), his mature studio recordings of the major Faust solos and Church Scene (with the excellent Florence Austral), of Ibert’s Don Quichotte songs, and of the Death Scene from Massenet’s Don Quichotte, for all their own interpretive freedoms and linguistic oddities, show an expressive use of  them, and never the outright disrespect they sometimes come in for here. And it’s a bit odd: Chaliapin spent plenty of his late-life time among the French (the major Russian ex-pat community was in Paris; Chaliapin was buried there); he created the Massenet Quixote at Monte Carlo to tremendous acclaim; and he was as revered in France as anywhere else in the West. At points in this performance, I wondered if genuine memory difficulties might not have been involved.