Since Chaliapin truly did develop his interpretations as “an actor who sings,” and articulated his way of doing that, his thoughts—on this role above all—merit some attention. They are found in all his autobiographical writings, but are summarized well, and given some perspective, in Borovsky’s book.^(I) As any actor of craft does, Chaliapin adapted his way of working to the nature of the character he was undertaking. Thus, his approach to Boris is entirely different from his approach to the demons of Boito, Gounod, or Rubinstein—characters who exist on the plane of myth and legend, however much they partake of human longing. He distinguishes first between characters that are the purely fictional creations of their authors and those (like Boris) that are drawn from historical figures. He then differentiates the historical figures as “objectively” described according to historical scholarship from those (again like Boris) that have been interpreted by a dramatist who has departed from history and, finally, those so interpreted from those (once more like Boris, or any operatic character) who have been further re-interpreted by a composer (the music “contains all,” he insisted). In each case, Chaliapin points out, at each level of interpretation the departures tell the performer at least as much about the essentials of his character as the factors held in common. Pushkin’s Boris is not the same as history’s (which is itself not settled and clear), and the Boris of Mussorgsky is not the same as Pushkin’s. We could even say that the Boris of Rimsky’s instrumentation is not the same as that of Mussorgsky’s own—the differences in vocal range (though significant in only a few instances) and in the relation of the bass voice to the colors of the orchestration give us a slightly different tone, a difference in inflectional choices.

At times, Chaliapin was given to reducing his process to an essence. It’s simple, he would explain. Just use your imagination to put yourself in the character’s place. This is more or less the equivalent of Stanislavski’s “as if”—and we might recall that Chaliapin spent many evenings at the Moscow Art Theatre, and in the company of Stanislavski and his actors. But in the case of Boris, imagining oneself in his place is impossible without evocative specifics of his personal circumstances, of his awareness of his role in the fate of his country and the emotional impact of that awareness, and of the fearful toll that sinful guilt extracts from him. So before “imagination” can work effectively, it must be informed by history (history as living presence, beyond the facts), by Pushkin’s great epic drama, and then by Mussorgsky’s much more personal view and by the motives and atmospheres of his music. Chaliapin went eagerly through these layers of research for the sake not of a scholarly truth, but of a subjective one he could immerse himself in and enact. He loved his long sessions in the company of the historian Klyuchevsky, who would not merely inform Chaliapin about the characters and events of Tsar Boris’ time, but carry himself away in enacting them—Chaliapin always wished that Klyuchevsky could have acted and sung Shuisky with him.)