CHALIAPIN’S MANY GIFTS

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 June 1938, Page 12

CHALIAPIN’S MANY GIFTS

STORY THAT READS LIKE NOVEL. Ecndor Chaliapin, more properly Shaliapin, died yesterday at the age ct’ 65 (writes Richard Capcll, in the London “Daily Telegraph” on April 13). Most musical executants, however brilliant, pass away and are as though they had never been, but the name and reputation of this extraordinary man—of his kind the greatest, artist, with his combination of vocal and histrionic genius, of the lyric stage of his time, and possibly in the whole history of music —will never be forgottenPurely as a singer he was supremely gifted, with a basso-contant voice of a range, power, flexibility,*expressiveness and tenchnical accomplishment that to-day has not its like in the world. But Chaliapin, if he had not been a singer at all, might have been equally famous as the greatest actor in the Europe of his time. And those who saw him at work at rehearsal at Covent Gard'en or at Sir Thomas Beecham's, season of Russian opera at the Lyceum Theatre in 1931 realisedthat his instinct for mise-en-scene and theatrical effect would have made of him a supreme producer or stage regisseur, if some misfortune had rendered him incapable of singing or acting. Added to the prestige of his genius and his person—he was physically a giant—was the romance of a lifestory that reads like a novel. OF HUMBLEST BIRTH. Chaliapin was born at Kazan on the Volga in 1873. He was of the humblest birth, and as a child and youth suffered extremes of privation. He himself gave in his autobiography an unvarnished tale of his childhood in the underworld. His father drank, as did nearly everyone else in their unlovely slum, and beat his wife sometimes td unconsciousness, Chaliapin says: “One day I felt sure she was dead,

and 1 howled with despair. As soon as she came to she caressed me, say-, ing stoically, ‘lt is nothing.’ ” * As a lad Chaliapin worked for a time as a stevedore on the Volga, ami he tells us: "We unloaded Hour. The five-pood (IXfilb.) sacks wore me out till 1 almost lost, consciousness. At night 1 lull stinging pains in the neck: and in legs and loins the bones might have been broken. • . . My mother began to make and sell patties of fish and berries. She did washing on board the boats. And still hunger gripped our entrails-” It. was not many years before Chaliapin was singing a-t a grand duke's house at a. party given in honour of the. Tsar, and he describes how: "The Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovitch brought me some champagne in a Venetian goblet on a silver salver. Drawing himself to his full height, he said, still holding the tray, ‘Chaliapin, the Tsar has asked me to offer you a glass of champagne to thank you for your singing, and so that you may drink his Majesty’s health-” Between his stevedore days and this briliant scene Chaliapin" had sung with a touring opera, had been given serious tuition by Oussatoff at Tiflis, and after appearing at St. Petersburg had made his name at Moscow at the ago of 23. Two motives inspired his art—a passion for national Russian music and his faith, as an actor, in the force of words. He once said: “It is a small thing to sing a song or ballad. What is indispensable is to understand the sense of the words one utters and the feelings that dictated the choice of those words.” And again: “In opera one should sing as one speaks.”. FIRST LONDON APPEARANCE. When Chaliapin first sang in London, at the season of Russian opera at Drury Lane in 1913, sponsored by Sir Joseph Beecham, he was at the same time at the height of his powers and already an almost. legendary figure. In 1913 and 1914 he appeared as Boris Godounoff, as Ivan the Terrible in

"The Maid of I’skolT,” and in "Prince Igor," "Khovanstchina,” and other works. To Londoners of the time it was the revelation of a new music and a new art. Never afterwards was Chaliapin heard' to such advantage, for in his pest-war appearances at Covent Garden. in 1928 ami 1929 in Boito's “Melistofele.” in Gounod’s “Faust.” and in Rossini's “Barber’’ the com-1 pany surrounding him had other traditions. and he seemed to belong to a different world, while the Russian company at the Lyceum in 1931 was a mere ghost of that, of 1913-1-1. During the war Chaliapin was in Russia, and at the time of the Revolution he took up the democratic cause, delighting in the power which his-gift of oratory exerted over the massesBut he seized the earliest opportunity of escaping from Leninism. He reappeared in London in 1921 as a, concert singer, and for years his appearances at the Albert Hall were enormously popular, although his histrionic impulse led him more and more to exaggeration, and. indeed, to paraphrases of the music in hand. A year ago he made his Sinai appearance in England, when his performance was a grief to those who cherished memories of the artist at his prime.

In private life Chaliapin was a man of infinite vitality. He was as proud as Lucifer, but could exert an irresistible charm. Along with egoistic, shrewd and simple elements, characteristics of the Volga peasant, went an unmistakable greatness. There was no possible company in which he was not the dominating figure.

In the course of his career he earned fabulous sums of money, and nothing came more naturally to his quondam! Kazan stevedore than to live en prince. He never returned to Russia after his departure in 1921.