Chaliapin - Don Quichotte - Ibert - HMV 1933

Chanson de la Mort de Don Quichotte, from the cycle "Quatre Chansons de Don Quichotte". Music by Jacques Ibert, text by Alexandre Arnoux
last studio pictures of Chaliapin 1936
Film buffs will cherish having both versions of this cinematic classic; the French is perhaps the more successful artistically, but hearing Chaliapin declaim and sing in his thickly accented English is a rarity that is entirely unique. The French version appears to be more congenial to Chaliapin, likely the product of his extensive work in Faust and Don Quichotte. Pregnant pauses, controlled swelling and diminishing of a phrase (in music, a messa di voce), and the plasticity of his face, all contribute to the unity of dramatic effect. Chaliapin had worked in a film version of Ivan the Terrible in 1915, but his unhappiness with the result kept him from further efforts in the cinema. Pabst keeps the camera at mid-shot, rarely using close-ups--as had Eisenstein-- to monumentalize the epic character in Quixote's romantic exaltation of simple objects and persons. If the camera dwells at all on a character, it is on Sancho Pancha, the eternal Everyman confounded and yet magnetized by greatness of spirit, a perspective which demands the child in us all.