Feodor Ivanovich Chaliapin was a Russian opera singer. The possessor of a large and expressive bass voice, he enjoyed an international career and is often credited with establishing the tradition of naturalistic acting in his chosen art form.

During the first phase of his career, Chaliapin endured direct competition from three other great basses: the powerful Lev Sibiriakov, the more lyrical Vladimir Kastorsky, and Dmitri Buchtoyarov, whose voice lay between the extremes exemplified by Sibiriakov and Kastorsky. The fact that Chaliapin is far and away the best remembered of this magnificent quartet of rival basses testifies to the magnetic power of his personality, the acuteness of his musical interpretations and the vividness of his performances.

He himself spelled his surname Chaliapine in the West, and his name even appeared on early HMV 78s as Theodore Chaliapine. However, the given name is most usually seen as Feodor or Fyodor, and the surname is most usually seen as Chaliapin. It is sometimes seen in a strict romanisation as Shalyapin.

Feodor Chaliapin was born into a peasant family on February 1 1873 in Kazan, in the wing of merchant Lisitzin’s house on Rybnoryadskaya Street 10. This wing no longer exists, but the house with the yard where the wing was situated is still there. The next day, Candlemas, he was baptized in Epiphany Church on Bolshaya Prolomnaya street. His godparents were the neighbors: the shoemaker Nikolay Tonkov and 12-year-old girl Ludmila Kharitonova. The dwelling was expensive for his father, Ivan Yakovlevich, who served as a clerk in the Zemskaya Uprava, and in 1878 the Chaliapin family moved to the village Ametyevo behind the area of Sukonnaya Sloboda, and settled in a small house.

Ezio Pinza was an Italian basso opera singer with a rich, smooth and sonorous voice. He spent 22 seasons at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, appearing in more than 750 performances of 50 operas. Pinza also sang to great acclaim at La Scala, Milan, and at the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden.

After retiring from the Met in 1948, Pinza enjoyed a fresh career on Broadway in the musical theatre and appeared, too, in several Hollywood films.

Pinza was born in modest circumstances in Rome in 1892 and grew up on Italy’s east coast, in the ancient city of Ravenna. He studied singing at Bologna’s Conservatorio Martini, making his operatic debut in 1914, as Oroveso in Norma at Cremona.

A devotee of bicycle riding, Pinza also undertook four years of military service during World War I, prior to resuming his operatic career in Rome in 1919. He was then invited to sing at Italy’s foremost opera house, La Scala, Milan, making his debut there in February 1922. At La Scala, under the direction of the brilliant and exacting principal conductor Arturo Toscanini, Pinza’s career blossomed during the course of the next few seasons. He became a popular favourite of critics and audiences due to the high quality of his singing and the attractiveness of his stage presence.

Ezra Stone was an American actor and director who had a long career on the stage, in films, radio, and television, mostly as a director. His most notable role as an actor was that of the awkwardly mischievous teenager Henry Aldrich in the radio comedy hit, The Aldrich Family, for most of its fourteen-year run.

Born Ezra Chaim Feinstone in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Stone studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and began his professional career on stage in the mid-1930s, when he was first tapped to play Henry Aldrich in the Clifford Goldsmith play, What a Life. Goldsmith then brought Henry and his family to sketches for popular radio series featuring singers Rudy Vallee and Kate Smith, before the sketches’ popularity moved NBC to give Goldsmith a chance to develop a full half-hour comedy as a summer replacement for Jack Benny in 1938.

By 1939, The Aldrich Family had become a hit series in its own right; Katherine Raht’s opening bellow and Stone’s adenoidal reply, fashioned at first by Kate Smith’s director Bob Welsh, became the show’s instant trademarks. House Jameson played stern but affectionate father Sam Aldrich.

In one way, the show and its star were deceptive, according to radio historian Gerald Nachman: like Fanny Brice, who played five- or six-year-old Baby Snooks for over two decades, Ezra Stone didn’t exactly resemble a clumsy teenager, either.