Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Into the mix of Russian ballet was also added imperial court dances from Europe. The blending of non-Russian elements into Russian ballet seems paradoxical, but such was Glushkovsky’s aesthetic—at odds with itself. The more his dancers sought an angelic escape from gravity’s pull, the more important it became to have them step on the soles of their feet, flatly, in a flesh-and-blood, human manner. And the more important the plot, the freer the performers felt to shift out of character, to break the emotional and psychological frame for the sake of bravura athletic display. The divertissements of the post-Napoleonic period included a lot of talking and singing; muteness, the defining element of ballet, was surprisingly rare. Ballet in Moscow thus developed along its own lines, reflecting local conditions much like species of birds evolving on a remote island—particular, even peculiar, in its adaptations. Elsewhere, popular ballets and operas imported from the West ensured ticket sales. But Moscow offered a bounded space for Russian ballet, like Russian opera, to flourish.

  A new public theater in Moscow was constructed under the administrative umbrella of the St. Petersburg court between 1821 and 1825, toward the end of Glushkovsky’s career. It rose from the craggy gorge where the old Petrovsky Theater once stood, yet was meant to represent a clean break from the past and reflect the new nationalist ambitions. Despite the patriotic turn in the arts, however, the spacious new theater, like the performances within, still derived from continental European models. Milan’s Teatro alla Scala and Paris’s Salle Le Peletier lurked in the conscience of the architect. As a symbol of a city making a new start, a city of the future rather than the past, it needed to be bigger, grander, than the theaters of France and Italy, standing above if not apart from them. Thus Imperial Russia’s orientation toward, yet projected dominance of, the West was translated into marble and plaster.

  The impetus to build the theater came from Dmitri Golitsïn, who replaced the disgraced arsonist Fyodor Rostopchin as governor general of Moscow. A basic neoclassical concept was approved in 1819, but no specific plans were drawn up until the summer of 1820, when four members of the Imperial Academy of the Arts put their heads together. The lead planner was Andrey Mikhaílov, a senior professor of architecture, with three other members of the academy, including his brother, also participating. The first draft was subject to revision, and the budget went beyond what Golitsïn was prepared to approve on behalf of the court. The extravagant plan needed to be scaled back. Throughout his career, Mikhaílov, who also designed the hospital where Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in 1821, saw numerous building projects either canceled or completed by others, the Bolshoi included. The court indulged him with commissions but recognized his limitations.

  Another architect involved from the start, Osip (Joseph) Bové, modified the design with the approval both of Golitsïn and the tsar. Bové had long enjoyed official support and oversaw the post-Napoleonic reconstruction of Red Square and the restoration of façades throughout Moscow. He could not, however, control the imaginations of the private builders contracted for the restoration work, the result being a riot of reds and greens that displeased the tsar, who ordered the façades swathed in paler colors. (These pale colors characterize the older buildings in Moscow to the present day.) For the Bolshoi Theater, Bové exercised restraint, eliminating, for reasons of taste, the nineteenth-century version of a shopping center that Mikhaílov had envisioned for the first floor and lowering the flat roof. He did everything he could to control costs, including contracting the masons himself and transporting stone bases to the site on his own dray. It was also his idea to salvage whatever he could from the detritus of the old Maddox theater; not all traces of the past were expunged. But as the wiser men of the Imperial Theaters directorate had predicted, costs still ran well over budget, from the 960,000 rubles allotted by the treasury to the colossal sum of 2 million.

  Construction of the theater lasted more than four years. In July of 1820, the first of the ditches was dug and the first of the thousands of pine logs forming the foundation hammered into place in the bog on Petrovka Street. (Estimates vary on the number of logs pounded into the mire: more than 2,100 for certain, more than 4,000 perhaps.) Construction involved hundreds of laborers in the winters, even more in the summers. It did not end until December of 1824, and then just barely. The zodiac-embossed curtain and scrims were completed after the extended 1824 deadline, and, because of the budget overrun, both Mikhaílov and Bové had to sacrifice the 8,000 rubles in imported chandeliers that they had intended to hang in the side rooms, replacing them with illuminations of papier-mâché and tin fashioned by local craftspeople. Bové also had to forego the giant mirror that he had wanted to hang in front of the curtain, allowing audience members to gaze at themselves; the mere thought of it terrified the directorate, as much for its radicalism as its cost.

  The finished building was nonetheless luxurious, with the loges facing the stage drenched in crimson velvet, gold fringe, and braids, and the open boxes on each side suspended, as if from the air, from cast-iron brackets. Columns on pedestals framed the galleries, supporting the arabesque-decorated ceiling, from which a massive crystal chandelier was raised and lowered by pulley. Oil lamps provided lighting, along with two parallel rows of candles fronting the loges. Even Russophobe Europeans were impressed at what had been achieved. “Travelers who visit Russia expecting to find a people just emerging from barbarism are often astonished to find themselves in scenes of Parisian elegance and refinement,” the Illustrated London News opined. The new theater was the greatest example of this unexpected urbanity. Although the theater was slow to adapt to new technologies—gas lighting was not installed until 1836, in tandem with the building of a special gas plant—the “orchestra and chorus were strong,” making the theater “a favorite place of resort of the Russian nobility, who usually wear their stars and ribbons at the opera.”21

  It could hold more than 2,200 people, but demand exceeded capacity, especially in the first years, prompting management to repeat programs and cram additional seats into the auditorium. The side rooms had enough space to host chamber concerts by touring foreign musicians. The entrance was graced with a portico and led to a grand central staircase and ample reception rooms. Five massive semicircular windows provided light for the auditorium and the stage on each side of the theater. Ten paired columns supported the gable at the back. Since it was bigger than Maddox’s operation, it was called the Bolshoi—meaning “Grand”—Petrovsky Theater. Over time, the reference to Petrovka Street was dropped. The space in front, Theater Square, acquired a public garden. Later a fountain was added. The ravine and pond that had once been on the site were filled with rock and soil hauled from demolished bastions in Kitay-gorod. Theater Square also came to include a smaller theater for plays, the Malïy, also designed by Bové.

  Both the inside and outside of the theater inspired, and were inspired by, national pride. An unsigned article in Moskovskiye vedomosti heaps praise on the theater and on Moscow, the rebuilt symbol of “the sword of victory,” ready to join the ranks of the great world cities.22

  The swiftness and grandeur of certain recent events in Russia have astonished our contemporaries and will be perceived as nothing less than miracles in distant posterity … Our fatherland draws closer to the great European powers with each achievement. Such a thought arises within the soul of the patriot at the appearance of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater, whose walls have risen, like a phoenix, in new splendor and magnificence from the ruins. For how long in this place has the eye been exposed to the foul heaps, the remains of horrendous disaster, and the ear to the thumping of the worker’s hammer? And now to capture the delighted gaze is a splendid building, an edifice of enchanting taste in height, immensity, and noble simplicity, coupled with elegance, stateliness, and ease. And now the inner walls receive the thunder of the muses; positive inspiration for humanity! Such is the magnitude, in spirit and deed, of Russia’s government.

  Unlike Maddox’s catch-as-catch-can song-and-dance operatio
n, the grand space was conceived from the start as a cathedral to the finest of the fine arts, one that placed the mercantile middle classes and the inhabitants of the Table of Ranks side by side “on the path to Enlightenment.”

  The nineteen-year-old poet Mikhaíl Lermontov celebrated the construction of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater in similarly lavish terms. In his “Panorama Moskvï” (Panorama of Moscow), a meditation on the walls, roofs, and boulevards of the city, he imagined the god Apollo, whose alabaster statue topped the portico of the Bolshoi, glaring at the crenelated Kremlin walls from his chariot, upset that “Russia’s ancient and sacred monuments” were hidden from view.23 Those monuments had been seriously damaged in 1812, after Napoleon ordered the Kremlin detonated and soldiers looted the decorative insignia and ornaments. Tsar Alexander I commissioned the repairs in a neo-Gothic style, and his successor, Tsar Nicholas I, saw them through. The Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater, in contrast, struck a neoclassical pose: symmetrical, monumental, and harmonious.

  The theater opened on January 6, 1825, with a benediction and an allegorical prologue featuring Apollo and his muses. Then “a soothsayer from a mythological world” predicted the nation’s future, the triumphs to come. There was also an affirmation of the vastness of the Russian Empire, the terrain it occupied from Poland to the Caspian Sea, from “the mists of Finland” to the “cloud ridges” of the “formidable Caucasus.” Bové, the hero of the moment (Mikhaílov was all but forgotten), heard well-earned bravos from the stage. Following the six p.m. opening performance, at eleven p.m. the theater hosted its first masquerade. It was meant to be an elegant occasion; patrons were told not to bring hats or “indecent masks” into the theater.24

  The opening of the theater brought the peregrinations, if not the hardscrabble existence, of Moscow’s performers to an end. There remained the challenge of learning multiple roles for multiple short-lived stagings. Some were made in Russia, others freely imported, in the absence of copyright protection, from Europe. The first years featured burlesque comedies and benefits for individual dancers and singers, but Pushkin also made his presence felt (as source for the ballets Ruslan and Lyudmila, Prisoner of the Caucasus, and The Black Shawl), likewise Cervantes (Don Quixote) and Goethe (Faust). Preternatural fare put the fabulous machines of the stage to good use. The repertoire included a balletic version of Cinderella, the beloved seventeenth-century folktale about an abused and overworked maidservant who becomes, via a magical helper and friendly critters, the sparkling bride of a prince. It was choreographed for the 1825 opening of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater by the twenty-year-old ballerina Félicité Hullen to existing music by her middle-aged husband, Fernando Sor. She was Parisian and he was from Barcelona, but they both ended up in Moscow in the employment of the Imperial Theaters. Their marriage did not last.

  Sor’s career in Moscow spanned three years. He composed other ballet scores, but is best known for his guitar pieces: studies, sets of themes and variations, transcriptions of songs, and sonatas. The music is discreet, polite, and much indebted to Mozart. Hullen was brasher, flashier. She was mentored in Moscow by Glushkovsky, who promoted her talents as a ballerina and then made her his partner as ballet master at the Bolshoi and pedagogue at the Imperial Theater College. She became Russia’s first female choreographer, and included Russian dances in ballets on Russian themes. Like Glushkovsky, Hullen distinguished herself in Moscow by producing comic works on peasant themes that would never have been staged in St. Petersburg, for reasons as much aesthetic as political. Yet Hullen still privileged the repertoire that she had performed as a young dancer in Paris, fueling the criticism from one of the administrators of the Imperial Theaters that she was pushing Russian ballet back in time when it needed to move forward. She serviced her debt to her homeland by introducing features of French Romanticism to Russian ballet. The amalgam she created—of the local and international, from the land, of the ether—helped distinguish ballet in Moscow as something different, something distinct from what was staged in St. Petersburg and throughout Europe.

  Hullen’s and Sor’s Cinderella, which was premiered at the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater during its inaugural season, exemplifies her particular mix of European and Russian influences as well as the distinctive qualities of ballet as revived in Moscow. The familiar European story is clothed in distinctly Russian garb to off er much more than a lesson in protracted courtship or even a tale of personal transformation, whether on the surface, through the heroine’s donning a ball gown and glass slippers, or, more deeply, as she learns to distinguish good from evil. Instead, audiences in Moscow (no strangers to cinders) were accustomed to patriotic sentiments being tucked into ballets and operas, so could interpret Cinderella, at least in part, as a parable of national striving. No longer revealing a girl’s poetic isolation, the ballet now featured Mother Russia as the heroine unwilling to be a maidservant to Europe. Her years of neglect and disrespect had come to an end through the expulsion of Napoleon. The heroes of the war, including the governor general of Moscow, Golitsïn, vie for the role of the prince, and the ball is set in the Russian imperial court. The big new theater also infused the modest folktale with potent grandeur.

  The ballets by Valberg, Glushkovsky, and Hullen mark the emergence of a Russianness that would define the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater for the twenty-eight years of its existence—and not only in ballet. The Bolshoi was (and is) also an opera house, and this same search for Russianness is found in the operas of Mikhaíl Glinka, who was immortalized even before his death as the father figure of the Russian musical tradition. Whereas the choreographers at the Bolshoi made their dances seem Russian by manipulating models from France and Italy, Glinka and his successors relied on exoticisms taken, more often than not, from points to the east. Archaic scales and scale segments came to define Russianness in Russian music, along with invented scales like the whole-tone and the octatonic, church bells, drawn-out lamentations, and, in opera, text settings sensitive to the accents and stresses of the Russian language. Most of these musical novelties were invented, including the tunes supposedly borrowed from the peasants. But by concocting them they became more affecting and alluring, more seductive both to audiences at home and abroad.

  Glinka came from a village near Smolensk, but he was cosmopolitan in mind-set, spending as much time outside of Russia as inside. He learned music in Europe and died in Berlin. His first opera, the pro-Russian, anti-Polish A Life for the Tsar (Zhizn’ za tsarya, 1836) was nonetheless feted as a model nationalist score. (In the Soviet period in particular, it received the blessing of nationalist ideologues, though not before the libretto had been rewritten, to exclude the tsar.) Glinka’s second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842), did not fare as well. Its eclecticism ensured it a difficult journey to the stage. Later, however, the concoction was heard with different ears and esteemed for its earthiness. The score blended European styles and genres. It also paid homage to the ancient bardic epic narrative tradition, and thus seemed to reach back to a Russia of yore: Russia before Peter the Great, Russia before Ivan the Terrible—in other words, Russia before Russia.

  Real or imagined, the success of Glinka’s Russianness was the bane of the existence of his less skilled, less well-trained peers. Among the more resentful of them was Alexei Verstovsky, a prolific composer as well as a central figure in the operations of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater. He composed music for the theater, but his legacy rests on his administrative contributions. His career overlaps with Glinka’s and picks up where Glushkovsky’s leaves off.

  VERSTOVSKY (1799–1862) WAS of modest noble lineage and grew up listening to the subpar serf orchestra on his father’s land in southeast Russia. He trained as an engineer in St. Petersburg but cared much more about his chief hobby: music. He studied singing, took violin lessons, and realized accompaniments at the keyboard. Engineering bored him, so he decided to offend his father by becoming a part-time composer, an occupation that even he thought beneath his station. Verstovsky’s first substantial compos
ition, a vaudeville called Grandma’s Parrots (Babushkinï popugai, 1819), set a low aesthetic bar. His technique improved thanks to lessons with, among others, the great Italian opera composer Gioachino Rossini. (Legend has it that Rossini gave these lessons to Verstovsky only after Verstovsky agreed to settle his gambling debts.) Patrons of the Bolshoi Theater flocked to see Verstovsky’s Slavonic devil opera, Pan Twardowski, but it was ridiculed by operagoers in St. Petersburg for its vacuousness and two-dimensional characterizations. It also paraphrased the scariest pages in Carl Maria von Weber’s German devil opera, Der Freischütz.

  Verstovsky found greater success with a clever blend of love songs, horror effects, and comic minstrel tunes entitled Askold’s Tomb (Askol’dova mogila, 1835). Set in the ancient days of Kievan Rus, the opera involves two lovers, a witch, and an unnamed character seen lurking, in the first act, around the grave of a pagan prince. Dark forces keep the lovers apart, but the witch ensures the rescue of the heroine and her reunion with the hero through some well-timed spells cast around a cauldron, with black cat and owl looking on. The unnamed character helps as well, but ends up drowning in the River Dnieper. Askold’s Tomb played to nationalist sentiments both on the level of Russian medieval plot and archaic musical elocution, and it received hundreds of performances in Moscow and St. Petersburg, becoming arguably the most popular Russian opera of the nineteenth century. Even after it was dropped from the repertoire, the dances survived (Verstovsky joked about the dancers taking them to their graves). Had Glinka not come along with his canonic Russian operas, Verstovsky might be regarded as a central figure in Russian music history. He ended up in the margins.

  His failure to top the success of Askold’s Tomb left him bitter, especially after the ascent of Glinka. Jealous, he grumbled that Glinka’s 1836 opera, A Life for the Tsar, failed as a piece of drama: “One does not go to the theater for the purpose of praying to God,” he declared in the middle of his hotheaded critique.25 Verstovsky thought of himself as the greater pioneer, but was stymied in his pursuit of fame, and thus laid down his pen, becoming a bureaucrat and politician. Positioning himself in the right place at the right time, Verstovsky toadied up to people in power so as to move up the bureaucratic ladder of the Moscow Imperial Theaters from music inspector to cast and crew inspector and then to repertoire inspector. Eventually he took over the Moscow directorate altogether.