Bolshoi Confidential Page 7
Maddox was done. He stayed in Moscow for a time, trolling the streets outside of his home in his familiar crimson cloak. There was talk of eviction, but the empress consort intervened to let him keep his house, instead of giving it to his actors. Eventually, he retired to the dacha and garden that he had bought years before, at the height of his powers, in the village of Popovka. He died there on September 27, 1822, at age seventy-five. His dancers and singers had become wards of the state and the Moscow division of the Imperial Theaters. Besides the remnants of Maddox’s troupe, the Imperial Theaters absorbed a serf theater with a staff of seventy-four as well as the French public theater operating in the city at the time. Maddox’s native Russian actors elegantly assured the empress consort that their pursuit of fame was not affected by “self-investment” but a desire to bring Russian theater to its “highest perfection.”64 Even in its ruin, the forerunner of the Bolshoi staked its claim as a source of national pride. The ambitions—and the failures—of Maddox’s theater would also haunt the Bolshoi, which would likewise endure corrosive conflicts between the coldhearted management and the disloyal performers, succumb to government oversight, adjust the repertoire in search of audiences, struggle with stagecraft, and squander huge sums. And the theater would burn, repeatedly, but always be rebuilt.
Maddox retired without a title in the Table of Ranks, but with a generous pension of 3,000 rubles and “six horses to his carriage.”65 Maddox and his wife, a woman of German aristocratic lineage, had, among their eleven children, a son with a stutter whom they turned out for bad behavior. The stutterer in question, Roman Maddox, became the greatest Russian adventurer of the nineteenth century. He spent a third of his life in prison or exile for swindling, assembled a militia of mountaineers against Napoleon’s troops, and, it was said, ravished more maidens than Casanova. Banished to Siberia, he conducted geological expeditions. The son’s exploits fueled anti-Semitic gossip about the father. The slander increased after his death. Without pretense to subtlety, one Soviet-era source claims that Maddox’s posthumous reputation ranges from a “prominent Englishman who was forced for political reasons to abandon his homeland” to a “thieving speculator and money-grubbing ‘Yid.’”66
In the end, Maddox was no less an illusion than those he created.
. 2 .
NAPOLEON AND AFTER
THE CHARRED REMAINS of the Petrovsky Theater moldered in the bog under its former foundation, home again on summer nights to “birds of prey,” “lots of frogs,” and their music.1 Maddox’s free-enterprise experiment in dance and song had failed; the tsar stepped in, and ballet and opera in Moscow became, with the exception of the serf theaters, a government operation. The Moscow Imperial Theaters administration was established under the control of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters and the aegis of the court, which oversaw artistic, educational, and financial matters.
The children were the first order of business. Their training in dance and music had taken place in the Foundling Home before being absorbed into Maddox’s operation. The orphanage remained proudly perched on a bend in the Moscow River, but it no longer privileged training in the arts. The Enlightenment educational principles of Catherine the Great and her personal assistant Ivan Betskoy were pursued instead in a separate building. Its name, the Moscow Imperial Theater College, was cumbersome, but it stuck. Throughout the nineteenth century the college expanded, its curriculum encompassing not only the arts but also the sciences, and enrollment increased. In the twentieth century, the prestigious dance division was renamed the Bolshoi Ballet Academy.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Moscow Imperial Theater College moved around as it grew: from a building in the market district near the old Maddox theater, to a series of stone manor houses. Three of the manor houses belonged to generals of long and distinguished service, one to a lieutenant colonel, another to a court chamberlain. The residence of the court chamberlain, an elegant structure of yellow pastel that still stands on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, housed first the college and then, after 1865, the business office, or kontora, of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. Toward the end of the century, a larger space was found in a building on Neglinnaya Street that had once been a canton school, an institution that readied the sons of conscripts for military service with lessons in everything from fortification to penmanship to shoemaking.
When the Imperial Theater College first opened, in 1806, it enrolled fifteen girls and fifteen boys. Far fewer students completed the course of studies in the first years than began it, because many chose to pursue other vocations. Tuberculosis also took its toll, as did personal problems. When the college could not fill the rosters of ballet performances, itinerant performers from the provinces and serf actors from Moscow’s manor houses stepped in. The reputation of the art improved, as did the training, and by 1817, the number of students had doubled. Five years later, eighty-six students were in attendance: forty-one girls and thirty-four boys in the dance program, three concentrating in drama, and eight in music. By the end of the 1820s, when the college moved to the manor house on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, enrollment exceeded two hundred.
Students entered the college between ages nine and twelve and graduated between eighteen and twenty. Those living in residence included orphaned wards of the state and children of people working for the Imperial Theaters. The college limited the number of boarders to fifty students of each gender; by an odd quirk, those living at home could train in dance but not drama or music. The curriculum for the beginning students included, besides dance, classes in holy law, Russian grammar, arithmetic, handwriting, geography, history, drawing, gymnastics, piano, and violin. Later, mythology, fencing, and mime were added. Once it was codified, the routine in the college was invariant: rise at eight, common prayer, breakfast, dance classes until noon or one, lunch, academic subjects, dinner, carriage to the theater for those performing, permission to visit home on major holidays. Dance rehearsals were often held off site; on Saturdays, the classes were inspected. Those students who did not, in the end, exhibit talent were given training in costume- and prop-making and the science of set changes. Those with some promise were assigned to theaters in Moscow and St. Petersburg as needed, with an obligation to perform for ten years.
Tales of life in the college are scarce but suggest a no-frills yet nurturing environment. One early graduate described being dressed “disgracefully, ridiculously, in trousers and coats of putrid light green fabric, patched here and there.”2 But the college was not Bleak House. Mikhaíl Shchepkin (1788–1841), a serf actor destined for greatness, taught at the college in the decades after Napoleon. He described his hard work there in a kindly cant: “Having taken on these responsibilities and accustomed myself to performing them conscientiously I seldom missed a day at the school. I soon became acquainted with all of the children, and we lived as friends, studying a little, but seriously.”3
The next concern was rebuilding the theater itself. For the first two years after the fire, Moscow’s entertainers performed on estates and in summer gardens around the city. Theatrical life once more ended up in the homes of noblemen, many of whom maintained private serf theaters within their sprawling compounds. The largest exploited the talents of hundreds of performers, and hosted operas, ballets, and divertissements of foreign (Italian) visual design. With the Petrovsky gone, public theater suffered, and many of the professionals that Maddox had employed lived hand-to-mouth. Only in the spring of 1808 did the actors and dancers of Moscow find a new home in a wooden theater on Arbat Square, designed on imperial commission by Carlo Rossi, the immigrant son of a ballerina.
Its completion had been slow. Ivan Valberg (Val’berkh), the first famous native Russian ballet master, was told that it would be finished at the start of 1808, but work didn’t even begin until almost Easter. As he grumbled to his wife, “The theater is not done and the pettiness of the intrigues endless. There are no costumes, no sets; the conditions, in a word, are those of a fairground booth.” Valberg fo
und the “squabbling between the sub-directors, actors, dancers, dressmakers, and assorted riff-raff” tiresome and came to regret coming to Moscow from St. Petersburg, where he had held a comfortable position at court.4
Most of what is known about the Imperial Arbat Theater is filtered through fictional novels and stories. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace includes a scene in which seventeen-year-old heroine Natasha Rostova, having just been humiliated by her fiancé’s father and sister, goes to the opera; she is joined by the socially ambitious and sexually alluring Hélène. At first the fakery of the opera seems all too apparent and fails to impress. But Natasha, needing to lose herself in fantasy, falls under its spell. “She did not remember who she was or where she was or what was happening before her. She looked and thought, and the strangest thoughts flashed through her head unexpectedly, without connection. Now the thought came to her of jumping up to the footlights and singing the aria the actress was singing, then she wanted to touch a little old man who was sitting not far away with her fan, then to lean over to Hélène and tickle her.”5 The opera itself goes unnamed but is generally assumed to be an anachronistic combination of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable and Gounod’s Faust.
The references to ballet in War and Peace are also indistinct (Tolstoy disapproved of twirling naked legs as much as he did stout prima-donna singers). Natasha refers to the dancer and ballet master Louis Duport, who performed in St. Petersburg and Moscow between 1808 and 1812, adhering, with majestic bearing, to the strictures of the French classical style. In the novel, Duport symbolizes the French influence on Russian aristocratic life, soon to be shattered by the Napoleonic Wars. It was an accurate depiction of the historical reality: War destroyed the Imperial Arbat Theater, razing it four years after it opened. The last event, on August 30, 1812, was a masquerade ball augmented by a mazurka quadrille performed by students.
War would also transform Valberg’s career. “When Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée marched into Russia,” he “became the choreographer of the hour.”6 Valberg’s transformation can be traced through his portraits. One likeness presents him as a curious man of letters: hair tousled, eyebrow cocked, a hint of St. Petersburg’s spires in the background. Another has him looking remote and austere, with bleached skin, pale eyes, and a thin wig pulling back his scalp. The latter is the appearance he cultivated in Moscow as a mature artist, a Russian cultural patriot.
Valberg had begun his career in St. Petersburg, teaching in the theater school there from 1794 to 1801. For a brief period within that span, by capricious decree of Tsar Paul I, men could teach ballets but were not allowed to perform in them. Shoelaces and social dances were likewise banned. The tsar loved rigid drill and martinet discipline and believed that dancers, female dancers, should be more like soldiers—that is, less delicate and more violent in their movements. Ironically, he met his end at the hands of violent soldiers. A cabal of drunken officers confronted him in his residence, pulling him out from behind a curtain and demanding his abdication. When he refused, he was strangled. Few tears were shed in the Imperial Theaters after Paul’s assassination. Men returned to the ballet, and the waltz returned to the court.
In 1801, following the ascension of Tsar Alexander I, Valberg traveled to Paris to improve his technique. Charles-Louis Didelot replaced him as pedagogue, raising standards in the corps de ballet and working to make Russian-born talent into “stars.”7 Didelot’s officially sanctioned reforms included creating a middle tier of character dancers, or coryphées, between the corps de ballet and the first dancers. He eliminated the “steeplechasers” from the roster of the imperial ballet and replaced them with performers who possessed supple limbs and expressive faces.8 Ballet historian Yuriy Bakhrushin credited Didelot with putting dancers in flexible, heelless slippers and sandals suggesting “Ancient Greece.”9 Out went the buckle shoes of the past, along with the wigs and rigid frocks that had limited the dancers’ movements. Didelot established a strict training regimen and was known as a zealous taskmaster, albeit one with a kind heart and a gentle touch. Both men and women were taught entrechats and battements, and proper posture was enforced in the classroom through taps to the legs and backs with the baton used to count time. Bruises and loving pats on the head were the measure of a dancer’s promise.
One of his most famous disciples, Yevgeniya Kolosova, had first been a student of Valberg’s. Her physical expression was considered more nuanced, more natural, than speech. The ballets Didelot conceived for her were lavish productions with elaborate scenarios drawn from a conflation of pseudohistorical sources. He found his ideas in books on history and mythology, which he took to the studio in the afternoons. More than one of his plots pivoted around the rescue of the hero or heroine from boulder-throwing, earthquake-generating brutes. Didelot was also fond of Cupid and virgin sacrifices, and dabbled, toward the end of his career, in Orientalism. He liked to assign himself the roles of powerful gods, in defiance of his skeletal frame and oversized nose.
To simulate great windstorms, Didelot made his dancers flap their arms until dizzy and faint. To suggest spiritual flight, he came up with the idea of suspending dancers from wires and had his technicians raise and lower them with blocks and ropes. Didelot scorned gravity in various other ways. For his 1809 ballet Psyché et l’amour, a demon flew up from the depths of the stage and sailed, torch in hand, over the heads of spectators. Venus was once carried into the clouds in a chariot pulled by fifty live doves. Biographer Mary Grace Swift happily ignores the likely carnage: “It is interesting to imagine the care that had to be taken to harness each dove with its little corselet, which was then attached to wires guiding each bird.”10
In 1811, Didelot was forced out, placed on a leave of absence for what the administration of the Imperial Theaters billed as ill health. In truth, a series of personal disputes resulted in the nonrenewal of his contract. Back from Paris, Valberg took over his overlapping responsibilities as imperial ballet master, choreographer, and pedagogue. The thirty-seven ballets that Valberg himself created combined the feet placements and body alignments associated with the French style and the technical displays of Italian entertainers. Val-berg also tapped into his humble origins (his father was a tailor) for creative material. One of his earlier ballets, from 1799, is set on the streets and in the salons of Moscow. A man from the lower ranks loves an aristocratic woman, and passion defeats reason with disastrous results. Although it deeply affected the audience, Valberg was rebuked by the cognoscenti for using modern-day costumes. “Oh! How the wise men and know-it-alls rose up against me! How, they asked, could a ballet be danced in tail-coats!” he remembered of the fracas.11 He subsequently produced a series of fantastic ballets and several domestic dramas that served the cause of moral and ethical enlightenment. In one, a girl named Klara must be educated in the rewards of virtue; another ballet teaches an American heroine the price of betrayal.
Valberg came into his own, and distinguished himself from Didelot, with a folk-dance-based divertissement about a Cossack maiden who, disguised as a man, becomes a heroic chevalier. Following its successful performance in St. Petersburg, Valberg took it to Moscow. There followed a series of pieces that combined dances, songs, and dramatic dialogues expressing love for Russian peasants and the sacred soil on which they toiled and for which they would fight. Gone were the pixies, sprites, and chariots of the gods; in came peasants, soldiers, and peasants-turned-soldiers. The choreographic dimension was reduced, but the overall popular appeal increased. The most significant of these divertissements dates from the height of Napoleon’s invasion. Just four days after the pivotal Battle of Borodino, which left both the French and Russian armies depleted and out of position, Valberg staged Love for the Fatherland (Lyubov’ k Otechestvu, 1812) in Moscow. The music was written by Catterino Cavos, Didelot’s preferred composer. According to an “eyewitness,” Love for the Fatherland was so patriotic it convinced audience members to sign up for military duty.12
THE GRANDE ARMÉE entered Russia i
n the summer and fall of 1812. It has been estimated that 400,000 of its troops died for a cause that had lost meaning even before the crossing of the Niemen River of Belarus and Lithuania into Russia. Perhaps the same number of Russians lost their lives, perhaps more. The struggle was not, as it tends to be constructed, ideological, pitting the forces of revolution against monarchic rule. By 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte had declared himself emperor and exercised powers no less absolute than the Russian tsar. His relationship with Alexander I had at times been respectful; their emissaries had mooted the signing of the equivalent of a nonaggression pact. Even the possibility of a dynastic liaison through marriage loomed. But Alexander’s decision to move his troops to the western borders of the empire created the pretext for the French invasion. Napoleon interpreted the move as a provocation and used it to recruit Polish forces for the battles in Smolensk, Borodino, and Moscow.
The war was a catastrophe for both sides. Cossack and Russian peasant conscripts under the control of Field Marshal Barclay abandoned their positions over and over again, ceding the soil of Holy Rus to the French without a fight. The behavior was passive-aggressive: the Russians neither laid down their arms nor engaged in traditional warfare. Instead, Barclay ordered the Cossacks to burn everything left behind: food sources, houses, modes of transport, and communications equipment. Barclay’s aides, seeing the wasteland of overturned carts and dead or dying horses and men, challenged his judgment. The tsar sacked him, appointing Prince Mikhaíl Kutuzov in his place. Kutuzov was not a brilliant strategic thinker—by most accounts he was inert and rather clueless—but he benefited from being in the right place at the right time. He achieved victory after Napoleon essentially defeated himself by overextending his troops in hostile Russian territory. The scorched-earth practice deprived Napoleon of the spoils of his conquest. Supplies dwindled. Marauding Cossacks harassed the French encampments at night and captured and tortured to death those soldiers caught foraging for food on their own. Napoleon persisted, insisting upon the eight days’ march from Smolensk to Moscow. When Napoleon’s aides second-guessed his thinking, he fatefully declared, “The wine has been poured, it has to be drunk.”13 The horrendous battle of Borodino delayed, but did not stop, the French siege of the city. The cost in terms of lives and materiel on both sides was exorbitant.