On the basis of the recorded and live-witness written evidence, there has never been a Boris to equal Chaliapin’s. Or a Pimen. Or a Varlaam. And there never again will be, because the time-and-place cultural milieu that, in its rough, obstacle-strewn fashion brought his genius to fruition will never again exist.^(I) But in the years—nearly ninety now—since his last performance of the role, there have been many worthy assumptions of it, and a few that rise to real artistic significance on their own merits. Pinza and Kipnis are surely two of the latter, at least with respect to what we can hear. (Both bassos, by the way, did studio recordings of the principal excerpts from the role, but late in the game. Those—Pinza’s for Columbia, Kipnis’ for RCA Victor—are easily transcended by these broadcasts.)

I am assuming that Pinza needs no introduction to any readers with interest in the operatic scene of the quarter-century from 1925 to 1950. But Kipnis, though certainly familiar to collectors of recordings of opera and Lieder and of comparable artistic stature in his most congenial repertoire, hadn’t Pinza’s glamor or radio-disseminated popular appeal; we won’t find him moving along to Broadway musicals and movies. And although he’d had a long and distinguished association with the Chicago Opera of the Mary Garden era, as well as a wealth of top-level experience on AustroGerman stages (Berlin, Bayreuth, Vienna) and at the Colón, he came to the Met for only the last seven years of his operatic career, eagerly awaited by the cognoscenti but by no means a household name, even of the classical music sort. On the third CD of the Immortal Performances release, there is a substantial extract from an oral history recorded by Kipnis, in which he speaks of the early years after departure from his home city of Zhitomir in Ukraine; of periods of impoverished study in Warsaw and then in Germany; of internment in the latter country as an enemy alien during World War 1 and his providential release to sing (the corny old script, but in this case “based on real events,” of the sympathetic Commandant whose brother happens to be in charge of an important opera house); his rapid rise in the German houses (“from the concentration camp to Königliche Sänger“), and on to his international career. As with the life stories of so many artists of those times, one is astonished by the independence and resourcefulness of action, the initiative in seeking artistic growth from any available source, and by the cultural assumptions that—despite adverse economic and social conditions—could reward such ambition, that are almost casually shown in these narratives. I’ll return to Kipnis and his singing below. First, to the Boris of Pinza.

In these late-’30s seasons, Pinza was still in his vocal prime, and had come to full maturity as an artist. Boris had been in his sights at least since the late Chaliapin seasons, in the last of which he had sung Pimen alongside the great Russian’s Boris. For sable-timbred beauty and monumental solidity of tone, and for complete technical command of the role’s broad and idiosyncratic expressive reach, there has been none to surpass him; any lover of great singing must hear the performance. Moreover, while the purely vocal attributes of his singing, always informed by the classical Italian precepts of legato and messa di voce, are in themselves quite enough to recommend his performance, I find him compelling as an interpreter, as well. Granted, Italian is not the “right” language for Boris. With the exception of a few felicities of circumstance (e. g., “umiráyu” and “io muoio“), it lays down a quite different, and occasionally lumpy, quilt of many colors than does the native tongue. But Italian is the right language for Pinza, and it is remarkable how quickly his noble pronuncia comes to seem at home with Mussorgsky’s mix of sustained line with declamation. And there is plenty of deep, tragic passion in his voicing, especially in his sovereign reading of the Monologue and in the Death Scene. Unless one chooses to abandon melodramatic realism altogether and strictly sing the indicated pitches and note values, there is no escaping the Chaliapin model for the Clock Scene. Mussorgsky invented it as a hallucinatory breakdown (there’s no hint of that in Pushkin), and Chaliapin invented how to do that. Pinza follows the route as closely as the lingua Toscana in bocca Romana will allow, and here as elsewhere tips in inflections that some observers have called “restrained,” but which I find often more natural, less rhetorical, than many, and none the worse for that.