Patrick Bade
Feodor Chaliapin: The 20th Century’s Greatest Singing Actor

Patrick Bade | Feodor Chaliapin The Twentieth-Centuries’ Greatest Singing Actor | 06.01.22

- [Judy] Hi, Patrick, how are you?

• I’m very well, how are you?

• [Judy] Good, thank you. I see that you’re back in London ‘cause it’s all nice and dark where you are.

• Exactly, it’s the black hole of Calcutta.

• [Judy] So that’s just, if anybody asks why he’s sitting in the dark, that’s just the way that it is in Patrick’s flat.

• [Patrick] Mm.

• [Judy] Susan is saying the images that you have on the screen look absolutely delicious.

• Yes, I’m sure it would make a very nice meal, actually, wouldn’t it? All together, starter, main course, to desserts.

• [Judy] Definitely, well, Patrick, I’ll hand over to you whenever you’re ready. Welcome, everybody, and over to you.

Visuals displayed and music played during presentation.

• Thank you, thank you, Judy. Well, Feodor Chaliapin belongs to that tiny elite of celebrated performers whose names are associated with popular dishes. I wonder how many of you can identify the names associated with all these dishes. But I will go through them with you. Pavlova, of course. And it should be light as a feather. And the meringue does indeed quite look like her tutu. Very different, not quite so light, pollo Tetrazzini. Named after the great coloratura soprano. She was a lovely, cuddly lady. And she liked nothing better than to whip up bowls of pasta for her colleagues backstage at the opera. This is peche Melba. Invented by the great French chef Escoffier in 1892 as a compliment to Nellie Melba when she stayed at the Savoy Hotel in London. And finally, of course, this is steak Chaliapin. And this was invented by a Japanese chef in 1936 when Chaliapin was on one of his last world tours. And he suffered from toothache, but he wanted to eat a steak.

So this Japanese chef came up with a method of marinating steaks that it would just melt in the mouth and not need much chewing. This is an advertisement for HMV recordings of Chaliapin. It dates from about 1930. And you could see Chaliapin, the world’s greatest operatic artist. And for once I think one can say that this is an advertisement that tells the truth and nothing but the truth. It doesn’t say that he was, had the most beautiful voice in the world. And it doesn’t say that he was the greatest singer. Even if we’re just going to confine ourselves to basses. I think for me, it would be Ezio Pinza who you see on the left, who would get the accolade of the most beautiful bass voice of the 20th Century. He was also incidentally, a very, very fine stage actor. You can hear that in wonderful broadcasts of live performances from the Met. But ultimately, in the supremely-testing role of Boris Godunov, for instance, he was really no match for the genius, one can only say, of Chaliapin.

For my vote, for the greatest bass singer on record would be Pol Plancon. And he was universally recognised during his career, end of 19th, beginning of 20th Century, as the most polished, not just bass, actually any singer. A miraculous technique with fantastic florid work and trills, and so on. So, no, and at the time, people in the early 1900s, various critics, while praising Chaliapin, pointed out that his technique was certainly no match for that of Pol Plancon. So what was it that’s so special about him? Well, you could say rather like the silent film star Lon Cheney, who was always known as The Man of a Thousand Faces, Chaliapin was a man of a thousand faces. Part of his genius was actually makeup. He did his own makeup.

I mean, you would never guess, I think, that the eight men that I’m showing you here are actually all the same man. He had an extraordinary ability to transform himself through makeup, through body language, and through the colour of his voice. He had a unique stage presence. I remember when I started teaching at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, and I talked about Chaliapin, there was a very elderly lady. This was in the 1990s and she was in her 90s. And she remembered as an eight-year-old being taken to the opera to see Chaliapin. She said she was absolutely terrified. He seemed to her superhuman. He looked like he was eight foot tall. And she said she had terrible nightmares for the rest of her childhood about this incredible superhuman creature. Here are more images of Chaliapin.

Salieri on the left-hand side, in the middle, and I’m not sure which Russian role that is on the right. So just amazing how he could transform himself into these different characters. And he was a larger-than-life character. So he impressed everybody off stage, as well as on stage. He was a man of enormous warmth. And I love this picture of him embracing Rachmaninoff on the left-hand side, a very cool, austere Rachmaninoff. And Chaliapin just throwing his arms around him. They were lifelong friends. And he was also a very close friend of the great right Maxim Gorky, who you see on the right-hand side. Luckily, we can really judge all of this. He’s also one of those rare artists who, where everything, his genius really comes across on record. There are plenty of singers who are hugely admired on stage in the opera house. And you’ve probably all experienced singers who you heard in the house, thought they were wonderful. And then you buy the CD, and you think, oh, that’s not what I heard. But we can really hear on record. And he made great many records.

In fact, the firm of Marston, I mentioned recently, they did that, put out those CDs of Rachmaninoff being secretly recorded by Eugene Ormandy. And they have brought out, you can have every single note ever recorded in a 12-CD box from Marston. And it’s well worth it. I mean, he’s one of those singers, even if there is, say, several takes of one particular aria song, every time, it’s new, it’s fresh, it’s extraordinary. I first of all want to demonstrate his bel canto. Bel canto just means beautiful singing, but it’s a tradition, an Italianate tradition. And Chaliapin certainly belongs to this tradition. I’m choosing to start with a very simple folk song. And he just makes the most extraordinary magic out of this, the way he spins the vocal line, his complete command from fortissimo to pianissimo. The tone always focused. And at the end of this piece, ending on quite a high, perfectly focused, poised pianissimo note.

♪ Music plays ♪

I think I better move on. That it is just miraculous, the colour, the variety of colour that he can get out of just a simple vocal line, completely unaccompanied. Now he came from a very humble background. His early years were spent in grinding poverty. He certainly made up for it later 'cause he made immense sums of money, both before the Russian Revolution and after. But he really, he owed his career to this man you see on the left-hand side called Dmitri Usatov. Who was a retired singer. And he taught Chaliapin for nothing, and supported him. He really believed in his talent. So Usatov was a pupil of a pupil of Manuel Garcia. Who was one of the, what was the most-famous singing teacher of the 19th Century. Taught many, many famous singers. Of course, he was the father of Malibran. He taught Jenny Lind. He mentored her voice when she had vocal problems.

So Chaliapin certainly had a very good vocal lineage. The early parts of his career was also greatly helped by this man, who I’ve talked about before, Savva Mamontov. Who was a great patron of the arts, created this arts community, and his own private opera house. And it was at the Mamontov Opera that Chaliapin had his first great triumphs, his greatest role of all. He had many, many roles. He’s a very, very versatile singer. But of course the role that’s always associated with him is Boris Godunov. This is, he set the standard. Every singer who’s taken on this role ever since, in a way, is in the shadow of Chaliapin, and is judged against him. So I’m going to play you, of course, I played you the famous clock scene before when I talked about the Opera Boris Godunov. So here is another excerpt from the final, well, his final scene, his farewell as he’s dying.

♪ Music plays ♪

And he’s particularly associated also with the Devil. In two operas, he played Mephistopheles in Gounod’s opera, and also Mefistofele in Boito’s opera. Both based of course on Goethe’s Faust. And well, Gounod’s opera was universally popular, but Boito’s opera owed a large part of its popularity in the first half of the 20th Century to Chaliapin’s absolutely mesmerising performance in the prologue. In fact, when he first did it in New York, it really scandalised. New York was surprisingly prudish. And this incredible wild man who, in New York, he was stripped to the waste, really the sort of animal quality of his performance absolutely shocked New York critics and the public. So we’re very lucky that when the invention of electrical recording, which happens in 1925, it’s introduced in 1925, coincided with the peak of Chaliapin’s career. And in the late 1920s, the firm of HMV, His Master’s Voice, were experimenting with making live recordings in performances at the opera house in Covent Garden. And they captured several performances with Chaliapin. So here is Chaliapin in Boito’s Mefistofele, recorded at Covent Garden, live in 1926.

♪ Music plays ♪

That was actually Chaliapin whistling through his teeth at the end of that excerpt. So Boris, the devil, and the other character that’s particularly associated with him, both because of an opera and because of a film, is Don Quixote. And just again, look at the physical transformation of the man from what I’ve just shown you, like all in wrestling satanic figure we’ve just seen. So this gaunt, apparently thin-looking figure of Don Quixote. The opera was written for him. It was tailor-made for him by Jules Massenet. And it was premiered at Monte Carlo in 1909. I’m going to play you the final scene where Chaliapin really gets his teeth into the role. In fact, it was too much for Massenet. Massenet thought that Chaliapin was really over the top, and he preferred the French bass, Vanni Marcoux. Who sang the Paris premiere of Don Quixote a little while later. Now this is a recording made again in the 1920s. This is a commercial recording made in the studio. I’m always amazed with these recordings that Chaliapin you know, it’s in a cramped studio in front of a microphone, could let himself go like this. Now, this is, I’m not sure that this is really in the best taste, because not only does he play Don Quixote on this recording, he takes on the role of Sancho Panza. So he’s actually singing to himself. We start off hearing Sancho Panza sobbing, and then Don Quixote says, “Oh, don’t, don’t,” . And then we hear Don Quixote fade away. And it ends with hysterical outburst of grief from Sancho Panza. But it’s all Chaliapin. He’s singing both roles.

♪ Music plays ♪

As I said, earlier in his career, he was sometimes criticised for his technique. There are certain eccentricities in his vocal method. His florid singing is very strange, the way he separates one note from another. But he had a number of Italian roles in his repertoire, including of course King Philip in Don Carlos. And although he was the diva, divo, I should say, their God, he was treated as a God all the time, he was quite willing to take on cameo roles. And one of his greatest successes was in the really very small role of Basilio in The Barber of Seville. But of course, when he sang that role, I mean he just upstaged absolutely everybody else in the cast. There’s so many accounts of people going to the theatre and saying when he was on the stage, you just didn’t look at anybody else. So I’m going to play you, there is a very famous recordings, of course, of Basilio’s aria “"La Calunnia.” But instead I’m choosing a rather unexpected piece perhaps for him from Bellini’s Sonnambula, which will give you a chance to judge for yourselves his technique in Italian opera.

♪ Music plays ♪

So some slightly strange things there with the little ornaments, the way he separates them with a sort of W sound. And the sobs, of course, won’t be to everybody’s taste. Little sobs in the vocal line. So we’re back with the devil. This is “The Song of the Flea” by Mussorgsky. Again, it’s a setting of a text from Goethe’s Faust. And it was a favourite piece for Chaliapin in recitals. So as well as being superb onstage, he was a very great recitalist. Again, the two things don’t necessarily go together. You normally find that a singer will be at their best either in the opera house on stage when they’re in the role, or there are other singers who really come into their own in the concert hall. But he was supreme in both. And again, he was very eccentric in this. He had a booklet published with a repertoire of say, 40 different songs or pieces he could sing. They all had numbers and so he, there wasn’t a printed programme of what he was going to sing. There was a booklet with all the possibilities of what he might sing. And he would just on the spur of the moment, he’d say, I’ll sing number 23, I’ll sing number 34, must’ve been absolutely terrifying for his piano accompanist. But it certainly gave an edge of spontaneity to the whole thing. Well, here he is again in very devilish mode in Mussorgsky’s “Song of the Flea.”

♪ Music plays ♪

But he could cover every mood and he can also be exquisitely dreamy, and poetic, and evocative. As he is in this very beautiful song by Anton Rubenstein.

♪ Music plays ♪

Hope you noticed there his exquisite use of falsetto and his management of it, so that the transition from the very masculine chest sound into the rather feminine head voice at the top is managed very smoothly without any kind of break. Well, for my next excerpt, we’re going to stay in poetic and elegiac mode. This is a very beautiful song by Massenet, “The Elegie.” In my opinion, there are two supreme recordings of this you might like to try out after this talk. Rosa Ponselle, which I couldn’t really possibly choose between these two versions. They’re both, they’re very different of course, but they’re both absolutely superb.

♪ Music plays ♪

Just an exquisite sort of dying fall at the end after this clamorous outburst of passion. 1934, Chaliapin was in London staying at the Savoy Hotel. And so were Sacha Guitry and his young wife, Yvonne Printemps. And some bright spark at HMV had the brilliant idea of putting these two into a studio and just seeing what would happen. So they had a kind of set up, dramatic setup, that the two of them would be speaking to one another on the phone. Sacha Guitry rings Chaliapin, he picks up the phone, says hello, and Sacha says, “I want to speak to Chaliapin.” “C'est moi, yes, I’m Chaliapin.” And Sacha Guitry pretends not to recognise him. Chaliapin has to sing to convince Guitry. And we hear a little bit of Yvonne in the background. Apparently on the same occasion, a duet was recorded between Chaliapin and Yvonne Printemps. I regret that it has never come to light. I would so love to have that. Because in her way I think Yvonne Printemps was an artist as great as Chaliapin, an absolutely extraordinary, fascinating stage animal. But we just hear a little bit of her giggling in the background towards the end of this.

[Clip plays]

• Hello?

• Hello.

• [Guitry] Hello! Hello.

• Hello?

• Oui?

• Yeah, yeah.

[Clip ends]

Well, they seem to have sort of run out of ideas improvising with one another. And the record was in fact never thought worth issuing. So it only appeared many, many decades later. So Chaliapin was a man of huge appetites of all kinds, rumbustious character. And you’ll get a flavour of this, I think, in my next song.

♪ Music plays ♪

And then to finish with a song that he often chose for an encore. And a song, of course, particularly associated with him and that he helped to make famous. And this is “The Song of the Volga Boatmen.” And it enables him to demonstrate the incredible range in terms of volume of his voice from exquisite pianissimo to huge, massive fortissimo.

♪ Music plays ♪

All right, let’s see what comments and questions we have.

Q&A and Comments

This is Esther. Oh, you’ve been to see the Met, Prince Igor. I hope, I’m glad you enjoyed that. So I don’t think I understand this, but I don’t get the he and the she. I’m sorry, I don’t understand that. That comment or question. Yes, he could’ve been a great cantor. Certainly those techniques of spinning out the line and going from very soft to very loud. Of course, the great cantors were pretty good at that.

Q: How do I rate Boris Christoff’s Philip II against Chaliapin? A: Well, I dunno, I might actually prefer the Philip II, but the Boris is wonderful, but it’s number two. I think you have to say that Christoff is not quite, he was always slightly in the shadow of Chaliapin.

Oh, Natasha, dear Natasha. “As a child, I heard how my father after a performance "of Boris at the Scala was taken with other Russian students "to wine and dine all night and sing.” Yes, probably just like that penultimate song I played you. Did he, no, he didn’t record Falstaff. He never sang Falstaff. Yes, he had that rollicking side. Interesting thought, he could’ve done that. I’m glad you love his voice. This is, oh, Judith. Judith, thank you. You’ve been to his house in Moscow. And his costumes, his gifts, and little, yes, he was quite a good sculptor actually. He was quite a gifted artist.

Q: What happened to him during the revolution? A: Well, he was so popular that certainly in the early years, he was kind of untouchable. But I think he came to realise that this was not for him. And eventually he left and he spent the rest of his life in the West and never went back to Russia. So had to leave everything behind.

I’d have to check that, I don’t know who’s playing the cello in “The Elegie.” Where is, sorry, mis-jumped a few of these comments. Well, at the time of the Russian bass, he’s quite distinctive. That’s true. Some anatomical, and I don’t know, I think it’s to do, I think the colour of voices, of course there may be some genetic thing in the range, the fact they can go so, so low. But I think it’s more to do with the language than any other physical thing.

Yes, it was Massenet’s “Elegie.” No, it’s not from Manon, no, it doesn’t appear in Manon. It’s an independent song. Both facial and racial variability. I really couldn’t comment on that. I’m not knowledgeable enough about that. No, it’s, as I said, it’s not from Manon. Yeah.

This is Estelle. My father was professional jazz musician, but his favourite singer was Chaliapin. And I was introduced to him singing “The Flea” when I was about three. That was very good thing to be introduced to at that age. Yeah, well, as I said, you can get it on CD now if you want. Wondrous voice, it certainly is. And the acting just comes through. It just leaps at you out of the loud speaker. He was, I mean, he was ambivalent 'cause I mean he was certainly, I think in his early years, he wasn’t in favour of the czars, but he was fairly left I think in his politics. But obviously once the revolution had really taken a wrong track, I think he was no longer supportive of it.

Thank you, Margaret. Yes, he was married and he had children. The name of the opera that the words, sorry, I don’t understand that question. Falsetto, messa di voce are different things, actually, slightly different things. Messa di voce is a transitional thing between, it’s the transition really between the chest voice and the falsetto. Where are they days of love, what opera, sorry, I still don’t understand you.

Q: Did he ever sing Wagner? A: I don’t think he ever did sing Wagner. He certainly could’ve done. He would’ve been a wonderful Pogner in Meistersinger. He would’ve been a wonderful, fantastically sinister Argin. I dunno why he didn’t, but he didn’t.

Yes, he was married and he did have children. No, there’s, Brian, you’re confusing that with Pinza. Chaliapin certainly could read musical notation, but amazingly Ezio Pinza couldn’t. And he was very embarrassed when he was singing in South Pacific that Mary, very famous singer, she was singing the female lead, that she could read music much better than he could.

And that seems to be it. And I’ll move on to other Russian singers of the Imperial time in my next talk on Sunday. Thank you all very much indeed.

• [Judy] Thank you, Patrick. And thank you to everybody who joined us. See everybody again tomorrow, take care.

• Yep, bye-bye.

• Bye-bye.