Patrick Bade
Singing for the Devil: Stalin’s Singers

Patrick Bade | Singing for the Devil Stalin’s Singers | 07.13.22

Visuals displayed and music played throughout presentation.

- This is Collets Russian Bookshop on Charing Cross Road in London, as it looked, I suppose, in 1960s. I used to go there quite often in the ‘70s. It was essentially an outlet for Russian, for Soviet propaganda. I wasn’t interested in propaganda, I was interested in records. So, keen record collectors in London would keep an eye on the record section of Collets bookshop. There would be a constant sort of dribble, really, of records coming in on the state-controlled label of Melodiya. And most of the records were really not very interesting. Like one you can see on the right hand side, they tended to be folk music or propaganda songs about tractors and communal farming. But in amongst all the draws, there was gold dust. And the gold dust were these legendary singers of the Soviet period like Kozlovsky, Lemeshev, Obukhova, Lisitsian, Dolukhanova, and so on. They had an extraordinary allure and status for Western record electors. And there were several reasons for this.

One was, of course, we never got to hear them live. They were very rarely allowed to leave Russia. They were considered national treasures. And if they did, on the rare occasions that they left Russia, you know, they were sent with minders to make sure that they didn’t defect to the West. And they recorded very extensively, but only for the state record company of Melodiya, and not on any Western labels. And these records were very difficult to find. And the other thing about them really was it they had, I think, perhaps, because Russia was so cut-off from the rest of the world during the Cold War, some of these singers preserved a style of singing that seemed to come from the past, some golden age of the past. That’s particularly true, I would say, of Kozlovsky, who I’m going to play for you in a minute. Now, music played a very big role in the Soviet Union, as it had in Nazi Germany, was very, very much art of the national identity. And Stalin, like Hitler, was a great music lover. And I’ll be talking more about that in the next couple of lectures. I don’t really how musical he was, but he was a lover not only of opera, but of opera singers. One in particular. This is Natalya Shpiller. And she was widely believed to be Stalin’s mistress over quite a long period of time. So I can’t really avoid playing at least one record in Natalya Shpiller.

Well, she’s hardly a favourite singer. She was certainly not one of the singers that we, record collectors, were desperately looking for. Now, if you are interested in the history of records of singers or music altogether, it’s very interesting how there are certain patterns, and patterns change. For instance, last week, when I was talking about the instrumentalists, I talked about nine instrumentalists, and eight of those nine were of Jewish origin. And this was not because I sought them out. That’s just how it was. And even the musicians I didn’t choose to play, Piatigorsky, and who else, I mean, Mischa Elman and so on, Padovsky, they’re all of Jewish origin. It would be really very hard to find a great instrumentalist of that period from the Eastern block who is not of Jewish origin. Why? That’s an interesting question. Why these strange patterns. Today, for instance, and I’m talking about singers, only one of, I think, the nine singers today I have is of a Jewish origin. That’s Mark Reizen. So why the discrepancy between instrumentalists and vocalists?

Another thing that struck me very forcibly when I was putting these lectures together, the talk I gave you a week ago about the singers who went into exile, a large number of the best singers I played you were sopranos. And people remarked again, yes, how exquisite some of those singers were, very refined with beautiful, floated, pianissimi, wonderful, diminuendi and so on. Well, you don’t find that with the sopranos who stayed behind in Soviet Russia. Why? Why, were they trained differently? Were they expected to sing differently? That kind of perfume refinement was obviously not something that was highly valued in female singers, or at least in soprano singers. So there weren’t any… There were certain sopranos that were all very keen to avoid. Like Elizaveta Shumskaya. You see her name on the label and you kind of groan. But a lot of those Soviet sopranos were. they made a very squirrly, wobbly, I think to arias, rather unpleasant sound.

In fact, Shpiller is not that bad. I think the record I’m going to play you is quite a decent record. I mean, she obviously had a good voice. She had a very distinguished career in Russia, thanks, of course, to her relationship with Stalin. And in 1939, at the time of the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Ribbentrop was received in Moscow with tremendous pump and a special performance of Wagner’s “Die Walkure” was put on in Kremlin for the German delegation. And of course, Natalya Shpiller was the Sieglinde in that performance. Here she’s singing Rossini. It’s quite a decent performance, but certainly without those exquisite vocal refinements that we heard in the exiled singers.

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So if there were no really wonderful sopranos in Russia in the 1950s, I suppose the best was Galina Vishnevskaya, who came along a little later. But there are certainly some fine mezzos. And I think the best of all was Nadezhda Obukhova who we see here. Now, she’s of an older generation. She was actually trained before the Russian Revolution, and she made her debut in 1916, also just before the Revolution. And she continued in opera, but she was more famous as a recitalist. I will talk about her again for her important role in Second World War as a morale booster. It’s a very soothing, very lovely voice with none of that sort of screechiness, which is so unpleasant in the Soviet sopranos. It’s a very cultivated voice actually. And I think she was regarded with great affection in Russia as a kind of mother figure, rather in the way that, say, Ernestine Schumann-Heink was in America, or Dame Clara Butt was in Britain, or Kathleen Ferrier, or even Dame Janet Baker. And so you’ll hear, it’s a very lovely voice, a very refined singing. And I’m going to play you her singing a song by Tosti. And this is the only item I’m playing you today that’s not in Russian, by and large there, during Stalin’s time, they’re very strict about this Italian, French, German music. All had to be sung in Russian. But here is a Obukhova singing “Vorrei Morire” by Tosti in the original Italian.

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This is Pavel Lisitsian, and as you probably guessed from his name, he was Armenian. So at one time I would’ve described all these singers of Russia as Russian. But of course, since the break up of the Soviet Union and because of recent political events, we’re much more aware of people actually came from, in fact, Natalya Shpiller was Ukrainian from Kyiv. Armenia has a tradition of producing wonderful voices. In fact, last night I was at the Royal Opera House, heard a spectacularly good performance of Verdi’s “Otello” with a wonderful new Black American tenor as Otello, really the best I’ve heard in many, many years. And a superb Armenian soprano called Bassenz. She was very moving and thrilling indeed. Well, Lisitsian… I know many collectors, I’ve already mentioned my great friend Alan Bilgora, I mean for me, he was such a great mentor and a source of information, always a great authority. And he was very keen on these Russian singers, of course. And he thought that maybe Lisitsian had the finest baritone voice of the 20th century. His, like all these singers, his career was largely confined to Russia. But he was let out for one tour in 1960, he went to America and he sang a single performance of “Amonasro” in Verdi’s “Aida” at the Met in 1960. He must have had the Met stalwarts Robert Merrill and Leonard Warren quaking in their boots at the sound of this absolutely incredible voice. It’s so dark and so concentrated, really marvellous timbre. Here he is in the “Prologue to Pagliacci.”

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Whatever way you cut that voice, top to bottom, loud to soft, it’s so focused and so incredibly beautiful. So I’m sure that the regular Met baritones must have been very relieved when Lisitsian was dragged off by his minders after that one single performance of “Aida.” So I’m going to play him again. It’s time in Recitle in a song by Tchaikovsky, which I’m sure you all know in English “None but the Lonely Heart.”

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Zara Dolukhanova, she was also, obviously, Armenian in origin and she was of special fascination, I think, to record collectors and connoisseurs because she belonged to what was then a very rare breed, the coloratura-mezzo. The coloratura-mezzo had been much in favour as a type of voice in the early 19th century. And a lot of Rossini’s roles, including “The Barber of Seville.” Rosina in “The Barber of Seville” was originally not written for soprano. It was written for a coloratura-mezzo. But in the 20th century, it’s very fascinating, again, how certain types of singers come and go. We’ve had, you know, this tremendous revival of countertenors in recent years, the kind of booming contraltos that they had at the beginning of the century, like Clara Butt. They’ve disappeared. You don’t hear them any more. In the '30s there was the adored Conchita Supervia, but she was unique. There was nobody else like her, until Marilyn Horne in the 1960s and '70s. And, of course, recently there are lots of very good star coloratura-mezzos, Cecilia Bartoli, Joyce DiDonato and so on. But certainly at the 1950s, when Dolukhanova was at the height of her career, she was regarded with awe, because there was nobody like her in her range, who could sing the Rossini coloratura with such aplomb. And here she is in Rossini in an area from “Semiramide.”

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Now I have three tenors for you, very different from the familiar Three Tenors, these are all very typical Russian voices, which are quite different really from Italian voices or German voices. They tend to have a slightly reedy quality to the timbre. The first of the three is Georgy Vinogradov. And this is a light, sweet, lyric tenor voice, I dunno how much he actually sang in the opera house. I think he was probably more of a recitalist and certainly very popular on the radio and popular for his records. And here he’s singing an aria from Musorgsky “Sorochintsy Fair” with the most exquisite, perfumed, delicate style, quite the opposite of the crudeness of so many of the sopranos of the Soviet period. So this is really a mystery to me, why couldn’t those hefty, loud, squally, noisy sopranos listen to Vinogradov and learn something from him?

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Now let’s hear him in a song by Robert Schumann, “Der Nussbaum,” of course, sung in Russian.

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Now we come to the most remarkable and most controversial of all the singers I’m going to play you today. And this is Ivan Kozlovsky. Now, this is not everybody’s idea of a beautiful voice. You would never describe this voice as golden. It’s got a very plangent, very reedy quality to it, which you like or you don’t. But technically he could do anything. I mean, all of us opera nerds so fascinated in the art of singing, we were all completely mesmerised by him. The things he could do, the breast control, the way he could hang onto notes and do an endless crescendo or diminuendo, the incredible range from incredibly high right down almost on to the baritone, he could do anything. And he was allowed to do anything because, I mean, after Toscanini, of course in the western world, singers were disciplined. They couldn’t get away with the outrageous behaviour of 19th century singers who pulled everything around to suit themselves. But I think in Russia, Kozlovsky could do this. And he partly could do it, I suppose, 'cause he was the darling of Stalin. And if he wanted to hang on to top note forever, what conductor was going to risk the displeasure of Stalin by trying to curtail Kozlovsky’s outrageousness. So I’m going to play you a splendid example of that, which is the aria “Questa o quella” from “Rigoletto” by Verdi sung in Russian again, of course.

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So outrageous, naughty, but wonderful. And so, what are we going to hear him in next, I have to… Yes, I think this is he’s in a perhaps more familiar territory. This is an aria from the “Snow Maiden” by Rimsky-Korsakov where he sings with great delicacy, not with the outrageous narcissism that we’ve just heard. This is a very poetic account of this aria.

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We finally will hear him in that wonderful song, by Rachmaninoff “Cease Thy Singing, Maiden Fair.” And of course, the end of this song with its wonderful dying away offers him a wonderful opportunity to show how he can spin the notes.

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Kozlovsky’s rival was Sergei Lemeshev. In a way they were always pitted against one another, they were singing the same kind of repertoire. as was probably being a bit like, you know, being Arsenal or Tottenham fans, you had to love one or the other. They apparently got on very well together. They were good colleagues. And there is a very charming snippet of film of the pair of them singing for the widow of Chekhov, who was at the time a very old lady, and she was called Olga, Olga Chekhov. And in unison they sing the Tchaikovsky aria “I Love You, Olga,” from from “Eugene Onegin.” I think you can probably find that on YouTube. So, Lemeshev, well, you can see he was a very handsome man, and he has a handsome voice. I think the voice, to me, he doesn’t have quite the extraordinary originality and magic of Kozlovsky, but it’s certainly a voice that falls easier on the ear. It’s a sweeter, more honeyed voice.

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And the last singer I’m going to present to you is Mark Reizen. He’s the only one of these singers who was of Jewish origin. And for most of his career, that was not a problem. I think it was only for a short time, right at the end of Stalin’s life, you know, the period of the so-called Doctors’ Plot, when Stalin became very paranoid about Jews and started to move against them. So I think he had a difficult patch there. But initially, Stalin was very impressed by him. And Stalin first heard him in a performance of Gounod’s “Faust,” where he was playing Mephistopheles, he was playing the devil. And so, after the first act, he was summoned and told, “You have to go and talk to Stalin in his box.” He was all dressed up, made up and dressed up as the devil. And it’s, of course, the irony was actually not lost on him, that there he was as the devil confronting the man who really was a devil. But here we are going to hear him in… Oops. Where’s he gone? Yes. We’re going to hear him in Verdi, and it’s a wonderful voice. To my mind the voice itself is more beautiful than the voice of Chaliapin. It’s a very noble, it’s got an incredible nobility to it. And he is a very impressive artist, if not quite the genius that Chaliapin was as an interpreter.

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I think perhaps I’d better finish here and come out and see what comments and questions we have.

Q&A and Comments

Q: “Who composed the SU National Anthem and when?” A: Soviet Union National Anthem, it was a competition for a new national anthem. I’m just trying to remember. I’m raking my memory here. Actually during the Second World War. but I, you know, I can’t remember who the composer was, who won it. Those questions, I’m afraid, are beyond me. I’d have to look them up.

Monty, “Would you do..?” I’d like to do a lecture about two Jewish pianists, Sofronitsky considered be one of the great pianists of the 20th century. And Maria Yudina. I only know the name Maria Yudina. Of course, I greatly admire Sofronitsky, and I’m actually going to talk about him briefly in a lecture coming up. Ooh, that’s interesting. Linda Levine, she says, “My mother’s cousin was married to Ernestine Schumann-Heink’s son.” Of course, she had an enormous number of sons. I can’t remember the total number, and half of them were fighting for the Germans in the First World War, and half of them were fighting for the Americans.

Thank you, Mona. “Lonely Heart” is very beautiful. Of course, it sounds better in Russian. The songs usually sound better in their original language. The tenor? Russell, his name was Russell. I’ve got the cast list here somewhere. And really he created a sensation. The audience went absolutely wild, and it was such a vocally beautiful and such a moving and intelligent performance. Can’t remember what his first name was, but it’s, actually, those of you who are in this country, or if you go in, you’ll find, I’m quite sure, the newspapers will be full of rave reviews, the first performance was last night.

“You think Vinogradov,” Maria says, she thinks he sounds like a woman. Well, I don’t take that as a negative. I think, to me, that that sensitivity, that almost feminine sensitivity that he has, I see as a very positive quality. “Seemed to be singing a falsetto.” Yes. I’ve got nothing against singing falsetto if it’s properly blended into the rest of the voice.

Q: “Any information about Alan?” A: Oh, I could… Well, Miriam, I could talk about Alan till the cows come home. I have so many, many happy memories of spending time with him and learning from him. His record collection has been sold. It’s been auctioned. So you’re a bit too late for that. I’m afraid it happened about a month ago.

Q: “Was singing in Russian, not the original language to please Stalin?” A: I think it was Stalin. I don’t think it was that the Russian audience couldn’t cope with it. And I think I’ve quoted before Galina Vishnevskaya being asked about this and saying, you know, how happy that when after Stalin died and they were finally allowed to sing Verdi and Puccini in Italian instead of in Russian. Russian is a very difficult language with all those diphthongs, those complicated vowel sounds. And her interviewer said, “Well, what’s the difference between singing in Italian and Russian?” And she said, “Singing in Italian is like butter in the throat.”

This is Herbert who says, “ recording of Leonard Warren touring Russia.” Yes, singers could go in the other direction. And I’m going to talk shortly, of course, about the great Paul Robeson going to Russia and singing there. Thank you. Well, Atlantov as a singer, I really can’t stand. But then I can’t stand Mario Del Monaco. I don’t like… I mean, I’d rather have a singer who sounds, a tenor who sounds like a woman. The ones who sounds like a bull on heat. This is Arlene, who actually finds Kozlovsky has a sweetness of timbre, very lyrical. As I said, he’s very controversial. You’ll find people who don’t like the sound he makes. It’s a very special sound.

“Aside from opera, did the Western style of popular singers…” No, it didn’t. It really didn’t. I mean, of course, the Soviet regime was very against Western popular music. Although during the Second World War, I hoped to be able to talk about this shortly, they did have swing bands in Russia. Right. Not quite, Arlene, I don’t quite understand that comment. Thank you for your thanks. It was “O Tu Palermo,” interesting that he also sung that in Italian. And it’s from “I Vespri Siciliani.”

“How moving and exquisite Italian arias sounded in Russian.” Very interesting. I’m very fascinated by how operas sound in other languages, and “Rigoletto” in particular. I have recordings of it in almost every language you can think of. And that is a complete Russian recording of “Rigoletto” with Kozlovski, which is fascinating and wonderful. Russell Thomas. Russell Thomas. Thank you. Thank you, Arlene, yes. I’ve got the name the wrong way around. He’s definitely one to look out for. My worry about him though is, of course, he was so perfect in the role and it’s so amazing to have a Black tenor in this role. I’m quite sure every single opera house in the world is going to want to have him as Otello and that will could be a danger for his vocal chords.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Thank you all very, very much and see you again on Sunday.