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A crowd of mumbling peasants fills a convent courtyard and hails, when whipped by his henchman, the man they do not want for Tsar. The scene changes and in his cell, by the feeble light of a lamp, a monk sits writing the history of Muscovy, how a Tsar's son has been killed and his murderer has taken the throne. Again a change; the Kremlin bells are ringing and across the square that separates the Cathedrals of the Assumption and the Archangels there files a procession —deacons, sons of boyars, boyars and the new Tsar himself. Gloria! Gloria! it is Boris Godounov. ... So goes the Boris of Composer Modeste Petrovich Moussorgsky, the Boris of Basso Feodor Ivanovitch Chaliapin, given last week for the first time this year at the Metropolitan Opera.
The Metropolitan's Boris, critics have complained, is Chaliapin with accompaniments. Moussorgsky's stark music is played in the prettied version of Rimsky-Korsakov. The chorus, the cast all save Chaliapin, sing in Italian. He, proudly a Russian, sings the language in which Boris was written, the language of the down trodden peasants. Being Chaliapin, the greatest of living singing-actors, he dominated last week as always.
The crowds cheered Chaliapin again last week, as Mephistopheles in Gounod's Faust, a benefit performance which made $7,500 for his Sir Wilfred Grenfell's medi cal mission in Labrador. Lest his audiences should fail to count themselves as blessed, the Great One let it be known that next year he would stay in Europe, traveling, taking his little pleasures.* In the U. S. there are concert tours, a few operatic appearances, fabulous offers from cinema concerns. But in Europe, with friends and family who call him "the little angel papa," he will rest, wear his rough clothes, thunder for vodka.
Towering over an interviewer, he delivered a "far-well" speech last week. Excerpts :
"... I have been the idolized and the hated, the loved and the misunderstood.
"I can tell it now. Now that I am through.
"Misunderstood! By critics especially and by my colleagues and rivals. They do not know that my art is different from that of any other singer. For them singing is a matter of doing beautifully the lines of the melody.
They are concerned with the proper 'vocal production.' tone "They into are the 'mask,' concerned using with the getting the breathing apparatus properly, knowing how to sup port the tone with the abdomen. Yes, that is right. But beautiful tone is not my art. It is only the background."
Cinema Singers
It is not unprecedented for a cinemactor to aspire to opera. Hope Hampton with the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company (TIME, Dec. 31). Richard Dix also takes his singing seriously. And last week it was pressagented that Charles Ray, 38, is cultivating his high tenor voice for a career. According to one Alfredo Martino, a Manhattan teacher. Cinemactor Ray takes two lessons a day when in town. At present he is touring with a vaudeville act in which he sings and plays the piano. It is a comedy act but now the famed Ray grin is just a mask for a great and earnest purpose. He practices for opera in his dressing room with a portable, collapsible piano.
Piccoloist