Bolshoi Confidential Read online

  MADDOX AND URUSOV acquired a parcel of land on an ancient thoroughfare in central Moscow. It had once served as the home of lance- and spear-makers, hence the name of one of the cathedrals that dominated the neighborhood: the Cathedral of the Transfiguration on the Spear. The plot was on Petrovka Street, parallel to the half-finished underground tunnel that would, following its completion in 1792, guide water from the north of the city into the Moscow River along what is now Neglinnaya Street. The water had once wrapped itself around the Kremlin, serving as a natural defense against invaders to the east.

  Before the theater on Petrovka Street was built, Maddox and Urusov arranged performances on Znamenka Street, in a theater located on an estate belonging to Roman Vorontsov. During the summer Maddox also began to organize Sunday concerts and fireworks in the public gardens on the southern outskirts of Moscow. Admission through the covered entrance into the gardens, which Maddox modeled along the lines of the London Vauxhall, was 1 ruble or 2, depending on whether the visitor sat for tea in the rotunda. The Italian theater manager Count Carlo Brentano de Grianti was charmed by the place when he visited in the 1790s, but since the gardens appealed to tradesmen—cobblers, hatters, and corset-makers—the upper ranks kept their distance. Grianti’s description of the gardens is briefer than his accounts of the passions of Russian countesses, Siberian gems, gambling at the English Club, and masked balls at the court of Catherine the Great. But he finds room to mention the great “profit” that “the theater entrepreneur M. Maddox” made in the gardens on holidays.18

  Maddox sank some of that profit into the Znamenka playhouse, renovating it in time for the premiere of the Russian comic opera The Miller Who Was Also a Magician, a Swindler, and a Matchmaker (Mel’nik—koldun, obmanshchik i svat, 1779). The score is chockablock with buffoonish, rustic ditties of broad appeal, even to non-Russians; the best of the tunes are heard in the central devichnik scene, a kind of bachelorette party for the heroine. The music was put together by the violinist Mikhaíl Sokolovsky, who had been added to Maddox’s payroll as a favor to his wife and sister, both talented music-theatrical performers. The opera was a success, lasting much longer in the repertoire than the theater itself.

  But the fixes were cosmetic. The Znamenka was a firetrap, and Maddox complained about its flammable flimsiness in a letter to the governor general. Sure enough, “negligent lower servants who lived in the basement” sparked an inferno.19 The playhouse burned to the ground on February 26, 1780, during an unscheduled intermission in a performance of The False Dmitri, a play based on actual historical events in Russia (the cursed period of famine, usurpers, and impostors known as the Time of Troubles). The lead role was played by a court-educated thirty-six-year-old actor named Ivan Kaligraf, who supplemented the income he received from Maddox by giving acting lessons at the orphanage.

  Kaligraf, who had survived the bubonic plague in Moscow, perished after the fire. He caught a cold while attempting to douse the flames. The sniffle developed into pneumonia, and then fever of the brain. Moskovskiye vedomosti did not report his death and focused instead on the survival of the governor general, the brave servants who saved their masters, and the prompt actions of the police in preventing the blaze from spreading to nearby houses by sealing off the ends of the street. Had the fire spread, scores might have perished, since most of the dwellings in the area were nothing more than collections of tree trunks purchased at market.

  An entire article in Moskovskiye vedomosti was dedicated to the loss in the fire of a bejeweled chapeau, “on which was sewn instead of buttons a large ring of a single diamond with smaller diamonds sprinkled around.”20 A hunting hat with diamond thread also vanished in the panicked flight from the theater, along with a pair of round earrings and “a silver buckle of gold and crystal.”21 A handsome reward was promised for the return of these items to their owner, an imperial senator. But the newspaper said not a word about the death of one of the best actors in the city.

  Urusov suffered a huge financial loss in the fire and was forced to surrender his share of the theater to Maddox for 28,550 rubles. Imperial officials offered to reassign Urusov’s rights to Maddox as long as the stone theater was finally built on Petrovka Street. Construction of the theater, the future Bolshoi, had not even begun when the Znamenka burned down. To see the project through to completion, Maddox needed to borrow a huge sum of 130,000 rubles while also settling the bill for the damage to the Vorontsov estate and continuing, per imperial decree, to supplement the budget of the orphanage. Since the fire had deprived him of income, he was forced to borrow repeatedly from the Opekunskiy sovet, the governing board, which was established under Catherine the Great for the care of orphans and widows, and whose activities included a pawnshop and a mortgage brokerage.

  Maddox had secured an architect for the project, Christian Rosberg, but progress was delayed owing to Rosberg’s health problems. In 1778, he suffered from “painful seizures” after being exposed to noxious fumes and had to surrender his position as a building inspector.22 It took Rosberg four years just to come up with a model for the theater. The pressure from Maddox’s creditors was intense. He turned the threat to his advantage by appealing to the highest power in the land, Catherine the Great, for assistance mobilizing a brigade of builders. Work proceeded apace, and the theater was completed by the end of 1780. Maddox was saved—at least for the moment. The governor general found himself obliged to instruct the police, in a disquieting memo from March 31, 1780, “to accord Maddox special reverence and respect and protect him from unpleasantness … Seeking to bestow pleasure on the public, he had traded all of his capital to construct a huge and magnificent theater and remained burdened by debt.”23

  The plans for the theater survive, although most of the images only detail the exterior and surrounding structures. The theater had a single entrance and exit, with three stone staircases inside leading up to the parterre and the three tiers of loges; two wooden staircases led to the galleries above. Later a plank-covered mezzanine and a masquerade rotunda with elaborate garland moldings, portraits, and mirrors would be attached by corridor to the theater. The rough granite square at the front of the theater was on higher ground than the fuel-storage area in the back. Wooden buildings cramped the square to the right and left, spoiling the view of the theater from the distance and posing a fire risk. Maddox occupied one of these buildings; another perhaps served as his horse stable and carriage house. The statelier buildings on Petrovka were held by aristocratic clans. The artists of the theater slept in garrets and frequented the clammy, soiled Petrovka tavern. General Major Stepan Apraksin, destined to be a front-line commander in the war against Napoleon, occupied a residence farther up the street, not far from the carved stone façade, made to look like leaf and vine, of the Church of the Resurrection.

  The belief has always been that the Bolshoi Theater was built on the foundations of the Petrovsky, but urban archeology places them 136 to 168 feet apart—the Bolshoi being that much closer to the Kremlin. Much as with the Staatsoper and the old Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, Maddox’s stone block theater with slanted wooden roof did not titivate the skyline, but it was impressive for its time, rivaled only by the Senate Palace, the neoclassical building that now serves as the Kremlin residence of the Russian president, and Pashkov House, which became the first public museum in Moscow.

  For a description of the inside, there are the piecemeal recollections of the noblemen who attended the six-o’clock performances in the 1780s. From their carriages, which were parked by a watering point to the side of the theater, they ascended a torchlit central staircase past the parterre into their leased loges, 110 in all, and further ascended, during entr’actes, to a buffet of cold cuts catered, according to the records, by a Frenchman. Entrance to the parterre cost 1 ruble, the galleries 50 kopecks. The audience on the floor and in the rafters included bureaucrats, students, merchants, officers, and valets. Mention is made in the sources of commodes for the ladies. The ceiling of the theater was fa
shioned from canvas-covered planks that, to the dismay of those trying to listen, deadened the sound of the orchestra. Large wax and tallow candles in forty-two chandeliers illuminated the space and mixed an odor akin to singed hair with the smell of the patrons. The light was magnified by mirrors onstage and off; torch dances by masked male and female performers served as rough-and-ready spotlights; handheld candles in the audience were used to read programs. Underground were nooks for the dress- and wigmaker, rooms for making and storing props and panels, and practice spaces for the musicians. Even those who could read music sometimes learned their parts by rote, saving Maddox the cost of a copyist, paper, and ink. Coal stoves heated the theater and the masquerade rotunda.

  The hall was Maddox’s greatest pride and greatest expense. (Most of the loans he obtained from the Opekunskiy sovet went to its construction.) The Englishman Charles Hatchett, an amateur chemist and son of the imperial Russian coach maker, recalled Maddox boasting to him that the masquerade rotunda could hold 5,000 people. Hatchett was either mistaken in his recollection or referring to the number of people who could be accommodated in Moscow’s public gardens, which had entertainments of their own. Or perhaps Maddox was simply exaggerating. In truth, the rotunda could hold 2,000 people, excluding the musicians in the rafters, and the theater itself no more than 900. Hatchett further observed that, no matter the size of the crowd, the well-heeled in the loges could preserve their privacy: “The boxes had veils of light silk to draw before the front so that those in them may be seen or not at their pleasure.”24

  Maddox pampered the elite, his season-pass holders, with coal heat and fashion brochures, and he invited them to rent their loges in advance so that they might “decorate them as they saw fit.”25 The seating plan recalled a chessboard, with the queens and bishops stacked at the back, and the pawns, the single-ticket holders, gathered before them. The participants in the masquerades, in contrast, tended to be “idlers and spendthrifts” looking for fun, and “gentry seeking grooms for their daughters.”26 The decadence and occasional tawdriness of the masquerades added to the allure of Maddox’s theater and inspired a grisly tale of fiction, “Concert of Demons,” whose hero, a former asylum inmate, suffers a psychotic episode in the Petrovsky. Sparks fall from the stars onto the roof of the theater as he wanders past a decrepit lantern-holder into the rotunda, which is illuminated, poorly, by smoking tapers in the chandeliers. The hero peers through the murk and the seductive swirl of red-and-black domino masks to behold, on the orchestra platform, Frankensteinian grotesquerie: “Necks of storks with faces of dogs, bodies of oxen with heads of swallows, cocks with goats’ feet, goats with men’s hands.”27 The powdered, owl-faced conductor leads the band in a respectable performance of the overture to The Magic Flute. The hero is introduced to the ghosts of famous composers. Then he is seized. “In half a minute,” the conductor tears his right leg off, “leaving nothing but bone and dry sinews; the latter he began to stretch out like strings.”28 His remaining leg dances to the music before he loses consciousness.

  The author of the 1834 tale, Mikhaíl Zagoskin, claimed, in tribute to Maddox, that it was based on actual events.

  MADDOX’S INITIAL BUDGET for performers was just under 23,000 rubles, with the cost of operating the theater and the masquerade rotunda, including the salaries paid to the doctor, the coal stoker, and the hairdresser and wigmaker coming to 28,500 rubles. His roster included thirteen actors, seven actresses, and a dozen musicians. There were also seven dancers, three male, four female, who were denied room and board, and who earned pittances: 72 rubles a season in the case of the least-skilled ballerina. His lead actors came from a playhouse that had operated in Moscow in the 1760s under the direction of the composer Nikolay Titov. Nadezhda Kaligraf, widow of Ivan, earned a modest 600 rubles a season for delivering lines such as the following from the German bourgeois tragedy Miss Sara Sampson: “A short disappearance with a lover is a stain, it is true; but still a stain which time effaces. In some time, all will be forgotten, and for a rich heiress there are always men to be found, who are not so scrupulous.”29 She parried onstage with Vasiliy Pomerantsev, a subtle Shakespearean actor much coveted by Maddox’s rivals—those upper nobles who conspired to pry his exclusive rights away from him. Pomerantsev earned a proper 2,000 rubles for up to a hundred performances a year and did not mind his employer insisting that his lines not be cued from the wings or through a hole in the front of the stage.

  The theater opened its doors on the eve of New Year’s Eve, December 30, 1780, with a dramatic prologue that extolled not Catherine the Great, as would have been de rigueur in the Imperial Theaters, but Maddox himself. The deities of the arts, Momus and Thalia, are cast out of Moscow when their theater burns down but return incognito aided by other mythological celebrities. A chorus greets them at the entrance to the theater on Petrovka to proclaim the end of their suffering in a boring, unfree world without art. The prologue pokes at the ulcer of theatrical censorship while also boasting of Maddox’s talents as entertainer. It was written by the satirist Alexander Ablesimov, the librettist of The Miller Who Was Also a Magician, a Swindler, and a Matchmaker, the comic opera that stood as Maddox’s biggest success to date. It was a step up from the witty fables that Ablesimov spent most of his time writing.

  Next on the program was a presumably recycled, quickly stitched-together piece of pantomime and dance called L’école enchantée, or The Magic School. Little is known about it beyond a playbill listing the dramatis personae and the names of the ballet master, costumer, designer, and five lead performers. The masks, silks, panels, and screens are long lost. As was typical of ballets at the time, characters came from myth, and their gestures were perhaps derived from picture books, illustrated tales of the ancient world. The inclusion of the magician Mercurius, god of eloquence and commerce in L’école enchantée, suggests that it was intended as an allegorical illustration of Maddox’s illusion-filled career.

  The music, also lost, came from the quill and inkpot of Josef Starzer, an industrious, well-connected Viennese composer credited with dozens of ballets. His collaborations with the influential ballet master Jean-Georges Noverre enhanced his international reputation, as did the itinerant dancers who spread his music around. Starzer fraternized at the Russian court with the Austrian dancer Leopold Paradis, who performed in St. Petersburg for almost two decades before getting a teaching position in Moscow at the Imperial Foundling Home. There Paradis taught classes of fifteen girls and fifteen boys on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from nine to noon, casting them in “sérieux,” “demi-caractère,” and “grotesque” roles based on their faces, not their feet.30 His agreement with the Foundling Home required him to set a new ballet every other year on his students, while also providing instruction in traditional partnered social dances: Polish minuets and contra dances. Those students with natural talent and true zeal were given extra training. The curriculum lasted three years, with an exam after the first year deciding whether students had sufficient suppleness to proceed. Those who flunked were immediately replaced, since Paradis built his entire pedagogical method on classes of thirty.

  Paradis was paid 2,000 rubles a year by the orphanage and given a housing, firewood, and candle allowance of another 200 rubles (he had requested 300). He was old-fashioned enough for the orphanage to want him dismissed, but its overseer in St. Petersburg was unwilling to compensate him for the termination of his contract and approve the appointment of a new teacher, so he was kept on the payroll. Meantime, Paradis was involved in a dispute with a former employer in St. Petersburg over wages owed. No one was happy, and complaints flew back and forth on luxury paper bearing florid signatures.

  Sixteen of the children in Paradis’s class danced in L’école enchantée. Their names are not included on the surviving playbill. The names of the adult dancers, the principals, are given, but they must have been traveling performers, since they are nowhere to be found on other Petrovsky Theater programs.

  It hardly mattered
, since ballet at the Petrovsky Theater was of much less importance to Maddox than opera and drama. It was also derivative, replicating Italian and French practices, and posing no threat to the bigger-budget ballets staged at court in St. Petersburg. The pantomimes Maddox produced had resonant names like The Fountain of Good and Bad Fortune, but gauging what exactly occurred onstage is hopeless. There exists the occasional newspaper bulletin about fantastic special effects and elaborate costume changes, as in the case of a ballet from 1781 titled Harlequin Sorcerer, whose trickster hero appeared in at least eight different outfits. Maddox also mounted the ballet Acis and Galatea at the Petrovsky. The ballet, to music by Franz Hilverding—a composer in and out of debtor’s prison—had been performed in the Winter Palace by noble amateurs with amazing (for the time) special effects.31 The hero, the poor shepherd Acis, falls into the hands of the reprehensible Cyclops Polyphemus, who hurls him through the air toward a mountain. He would have been killed by the blow had he not been saved by Love. Polyphemus goes for the kill again in the second act, this time hurling an entire cliff toward Acis and his beloved, the beautiful nymph Galatea. Love intervenes once more, gathering the shepherd and nymph into his arms and sweeping them through the clouds into his namesake kingdom. Neither the pulleys and ropes used to produce these marvels nor the reactions of the audience to them are mentioned in the sources. It was said, however, that when the ballet was presented at the Winter Palace, the apotheosis brought tears to Catherine the Great’s eyes.

  Maddox first relied on Paradis as ballet teacher and creator before turning to expatriate Italian talent. In 1782, Maddox enlisted Francesco Morelli, a Milanese dancer who had performed for seven years in St. Petersburg before settling into a teaching position at Moscow University. Morelli’s sacrifice to his art left his once-acrobatic legs battered and fragile and his feet (in the opinion of one of his students) “scorched.”32 The official records of his career cannot be trusted, since he suffered amnesia in his dotage and filled them with errors. It seems that, near the end of his life, he taught dance to serfs, but evidence also finds him doing clerical work and engaged in regular disputes with his employer. He married the daughter of a count and lived in the count’s home, later boasting that he somehow prevented its destruction by Napoleon’s troops. Morelli remained with Maddox for about fourteen years. His tasks included teaching classes and leading rehearsals; ordering masks, costumes, and props; arranging auditions; moving dancers on and off of the stage; and cueing the orchestra. Morelli created ballets about star-crossed love, ancient and modern, on land and sea, but nothing that lasted beyond a single season. His brother Cosmo, a dancer of loose morals involved in several sex scandals, helped him with his work. Morelli’s final ballet for Maddox was The Two-Timed Village Doctor—an attractive potpourri organized much like a comic opera, but with gesture doing the work of song.