 
| "Only now do I
realise that I never had, up to this time, any but poor devils." - Arrigo Boito |
| "It is impossible to
describe how he sang. He sang as Tolstoy wrote." - Sergei Rachmaninov |
| "It took the
audience but a brief moment to see that an unusual artist was before them, and when his
voice rang out the ear emphasized the impression of the eye." - The New York Herald |
|
|
FEODOR
CHALIAPIN
1873-1938The most
influential opera singer ever was an imposing figure of a man with a dark-timbred basso-cantante
voice. Feodor Chaliapin, born the same year as Enrico Caruso (who also played
a crucial part in changing the art form), was the first Russian singer to establish a
great international career, and his reputation stretches across the decades. His impact in
making the drama and the acting in opera equal with the music, and in transforming the basso
from supporting player to protagonist, is still felt today - partly by way of the wealth
of written and recorded material he left
us.
With only four years of formal schooling, Chaliapin fled a
poverty-stricken and abusive home at age 17, and joined a traveling theatre company. In
terms of music, the story is that he was self-taught - but at age 19, he met Dmitri
Uzatov, a retired tenor. Himself a second-generation pupil of the legendary teacher Manuel García, Uzatov gave Chaliapin classic vocal
technique, grounded in the singing expression of earlier centuries.
His career began at the Tiflis (later Tbilisi) Opera, the
Mariinsky Theater (later known as the Kirov) and especially at Moscow Private Opera, where
Chaliapin helped bring works by Russian composers to the stage. By the age of 26 when he
joined the Bolshoi, he was already the foremost opera singer in Russia. At 29 - singing
his first engagement abroad and his first opera in Italian - he shared the stage at La
Scala with Enrico Caruso in Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele, redefining the title role
for the composer, and becoming the foremost bass singing in Europe. In 1907 Chaliapin made
his Metropolitan Opera debut in that same role and also played
Don Basilio [see reviews, below]. For Opéra Monte Carlo in 1910 he created the
title role in Massenet's Don Quichotte (a role written specifically for him) and
later made a film of the opera. But it was not until Diaghilev brought Boris Godunov
and a season of Russian opera to Paris in 1908 and then to London in 1913-14, that
Chaliapin was fully acclaimed as the great artist he was. That second season, he sang four
performances in each of four Russian operas in a two-month time span, to the applause of
audiences, critics - and himself. Chaliapin wrote, rather delightedly, in a letter: "...From
good luck, I am stringing here my performances like pearls, one next to another. Which one
is better, I cannot say."
After the revolution Chaliapin remained in Russia for a time, but eventually found the
rigidity of the Communist regime as distasteful as the Romanov, and he subsequently
emigrated. He was denounced as an "anti-revolutionary" and deprived of all his
Russian property and titles. He died in Paris, an exile, in 1938.
But back in the winter of 1907-08, at the age of 34, Chaliapin arrived in New York and set
the city alight. Earning a staggering $1,600 a performance [more than $33,000 in 2005
dollars], he created a furore in the operatic world [reviews, below!] and redefined the notion of dramatic
performance by bringing a fiercely committed intelligence to his roles and immersing
himself in them fully - bodily and vocally. Remember that a basso, before
Chaliapin, was neither an artist nor a star.
He did not much care for the Americans' greedy pursuit of
money and their general ignorance of art, though the audiences embraced him. Many critics
seemed unable to understand his work on stage, and there is some evidence that the
Metropolitan Opera management provided him with translations of only the hostile reviews,
presumably as a cost-saving measure. In his splendid biography of
Chaliapin, Victor Borovsky quotes a reference that an American critic of the time
thought that "the initiative was coming from the all-powerful director of the
Metropolitan Opera, Heinrich Conried, 'who had no desire to retain in his company a bass
who demanded sixteen hundred dollars a night, a high salary for a soprano or a
tenor.'" Needless to say, the Metropolitan Opera History web page leaves
this part out. Chaliapin was all too glad to see the end of his American tour.
Chaliapin was known for his exuberance in life, as well as on the stage.
"The great Russian basso was a friend of the family
and a frequent visitor in our home. Not that we children got to see too much of him.
Chaliapin had a towering reputation as a story-teller – he was probably the greatest
raconteur in all of Russia. The trouble was that most of his stories were of the sort that
are not supposed to be fit for the ears of children. And so, as soon as dinner was over,
my brother and I were sent away to our quarters, and all we heard of Chaliapin’s
stories were the gales of roaring laughter that emanated from the living room."
- Boris Goldovsky, vocal coach /
director
Considered the greatest dramatic singer of his day, Chaliapin was one of the first singers
to apply psychological techniques to operatic acting. The way the character stands, the
way he moves, how he turns, what he would wear, the rhythm of his speech translated into
music - all was based on that character's thoughts and emotions at the time, rather than
on any kind of stand-and-sing operatic convention. His insistence that every aspect of a
performance - production and lighting details, not just the music or the words - should be
dedicated to the dramatic and psychological essence of the work being performed was, in
those days, nothing short of revolutionary.
"The opera singer has to contend not with one, but
with three arts at once - vocal, musical and theatrical. In this reside both the
difficulty and the advantages of his creative work.... These three arts the singer must
fuse into one, and direct it to a common aim."
- Constantin Stanislavskiy
"My Life in Art and The Actor's Workshop"
1936
That same insistence could sometimes make working with him
a contentious proposition, to put it mildly - he didn't suffer fools gladly. But all his
focus on detail was less for his ego and more for the complete presentation of the work;
Chaliapin sometimes produced (stage directed) the operas he performed in, and he always
designed his own makeup and wigs to create the look he wanted. Note this reaction, from
the well-respected critic Vladimir Vasilievich Stasov, after seeing a performance of
Rimsky-Korsakov's Sadko:
"...the Viking himself suddenly appears, looking
as if his bones had been hacked from the cliffs. There he stands, immense... His gigantic
voice, the prodigious eloquence of his singing, the herculean movements of his body and
arms, as if a statue had been given life and movement, the look under his thick frowning
brow: all this was so new, so powerfully and deeply real that I could not help asking
myself, completely stunned, 'But who is this, who is it? What actor? Where can one find
people like that in Moscow? What amazing people!' And suddenly in the interval I found out
that it was none other than Chaliapin."
| Chaliapin's appearances on the opera stage
introduced some decisive changes in the opera-performance status quo. A perfectionist with
regard to his makeup, costumes, dramatic and musical preparation, he was very attentive to
the staging of the shows he was in. In developing his performance style, he studied actors
and painters as well as singers. He was almost more actor than singer in his
approach to the characters he portrayed, and he always used his body as much as his face
or his voice. And at more than six feet tall, he had a lot of body to work with; and would
really use the differences between his height and that of other singers rather than trying
to disguise it. |
 |
As mesmerizing an actor as he was, we remember him equally
for the grace and power of his singing. For Chaliapin, moving away from the era of bel
canto as he was, beautiful singing was not merely elegant vocalism with some
dexterity in the execution of ornaments, but a language of expression, the grammar of
its effects responsive to the setting of the words. [Michael Scott, in The Record
of Singing] His friendship and collaboration with the composer Sergei
Rachmaninov was one of great importance for both of them - Rachmaninov coached Chaliapin
in several roles, including Boris, and gave him an education he'd never had, in the
history and styles of music. Chaliapin showed the composer something of the possibilities
for the human voice, and as a result, Rachmaninov's songs are some of the most exquisite
ever written.
So in order to convey to the audience what his character is
thinking or feeling, whether on the opera stage or in the recital hall, Chaliapin might
take liberties with the music - deliberately push a note sharp or vary the tempo - in
order to gain dramatic intensity. Even though many of the Italian singing devices that
were used for variations in the vocal line or for ornamenting the singing originated for that
language (note they all have Italian names) Chaliapin managed to apply them to the cadence
of the Russian language, so unlike Italian, in ways that few have ever been able to do.
And some critics may have complained that he distorted music beyond recognition - but his
expressive acting and his unique interpretation of the music connected Chaliapin to his
audience in the personality of the character, and made him a collaborator with the
composer of every piece he sang. Oda Slobodskaya wrote, "[H]ear him interpret
four or five different songs, and you would think it was four or five different
singers."
With the great gift of the voice, Chaliapin was fortunate
to have learned the right techniques at the right time in his life to give him complete
control over the voice, including messa di voce. Chaliapin had a range, power,
flexibility and expressiveness to his voice that was unusual in his time, and remains so.
He could spin out a fil de voix, a "thread of voice," to diminsh or
swell the tone. This kind of control is exceptional, especially at the pianissimo
level - and extremely unusual for the lower voices. Arthur Rubinstein said it had a "unique
quality; powerful and caressing, soft as a baritone's and flexible as a tenor's, it
sounded as natural as a speaking voice." Interesting to recall that his most
influential teacher, Uzatov, had himself been a tenor.
Chaliapin gave an impression of both
spontaneity and intensity in everything he sang - something that we not only hear little
of in today's world, but something that was exceptional enough in his time to make him
noted for far, far more than his towering stage presence.
"Chaliapin will never die; for with his fabulous
talent this marvellous artist can never be forgotten... To future generations Chaliapin
will become a legend."
- Sergei Rachmaninov
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Step back a hundred years and acquaint yourself with
this remarkable artist by reading some of the accounts of Feodor Chaliapin's dynamic
performances at the Met, below: the first two roles of his debut season in 1907, and his
Boris Godunov in 1921. |
