Of course the Siébel here (Jane Laugier, a soprano, though not as light a one as, say, Liliane Berton) had neither the equipment nor the inclination to take her music on out into Rewrite Land with Chaliapin—nor, from her place in the pecking order, would she have had permission to do so. Yet Goossens worked with her to create a scene, not just a song, and the orchestra, accustomed to that difference, went right along. A casual impression might be that the song is disjointed and many “liberties”  are taken. But the result is that the singer is clear about what’s supposed to happen, what must be accomplished, and the orchestra knows how to move, how to sound, to enable that. Trace elements of these liberties are indicated in many performances of this song; here, they are forcefully and purposefully delineated.

We must keep the question of to what degree performers are granted power over their own materials separate from that of how we react to what they do with that power. Disapproval of a performer’s choices or taste does not negate the principle of ownership, nor does the latter necessarily conflict with the desirability of integrated production. Chaliapin often found himself (as he would today, under much more tightly controlled situations) in surroundings that partook of no such integration. So he did what he knew how to do, and extended it as far as possible. In the case of Faust, the fit was an uneasy one. But on his native ground, whereon but for political calamity he would have spent much more of his life, that was not so.

And so to Boris. We can, to be sure, think of instances of other singers who have left so strong an imprint on a role that we cannot dissociate the one from the other. The two other mega-influencers cited by Michael Scott in the Marston booklet afford us such instances: Caruso’s Canio, or Callas as Norma or Lucia. So, as I have suggested (see the posts of 9/29/17 and 10/13/17) do the Marschallin and Sieglinde of Lotte Lehmann. Yet the melding of Chaliapin with Mussorgky’s guilty Tsar remains something beyond these. As I outlined in Part One (q.v.), Chaliapin first came to the role while with the Mamontov Private Opera in the late 1890s, having developed an affinity for Mussorgsky’s music during his period of study with Usatov in Tiflis. The opera, first given (1874) in its “original revised” version, had found respect and some adherents, but had not been particularly successful. The Mamontov production was the first staged presentation in Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestration, and this was undoubtedly a factor in its appeal; Chaliapin himself maintained that the opera would not have found a place in the repertory without it. But it was his own embodiment of the great tragic figure that is the title role that was now decisive, as it was to be at the Imperial Theatres; in Paris when Diaghilev first brought Boris to the West; and everywhere Chaliapin subsequently sang it, including the Met, where it won him the recognition he had not been granted earlier, and Covent Garden, in performances like the one we are about to consider.