Noah's Notes: musings of a 17-year-old musician (no.9)

In his earlier years, the great operatic bass Boris Christoff (1914-93) was forced through illness into the confines of his own home for around six months. Lost as what to do, he turned to a hand-crank gramophone provided by his father's friend. He used the opportunity to listen to each of the great singers of the time, names like Toti Dal Monte, Tito Schipa, Feodor Chaliapin, Titta Ruffo – and even the man who would later become his teacher, Riccardo Stracciari. When he spoke in a BBC interview in 1979, there was in his voice a great gratitude for all he had learned. Whether this ordeal was in fact the forging of the master, or an ancillary incident in his life is for the biographers to decide. I think it can’t have hurt. These recordings which are nowadays confined to the ‘historical’ are marvellously educational, each an explosive cocktail of invention, personality and calf-bound tradition.