Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  The theater opened to the public on August 20, 1856, with a staging of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera I Puritani (The Puritans) starring a cast of internationally recognized singers, including Enrico Calzolari, Frederick Lablache, and Angiolina Bosio, a twenty-five-year-old coloratura soprano much admired by Tsar Alexander II. There was no thought of performing a Russian opera, since the court had long preferred Italian ones—the more exuberant the better—and the first ballet would be staged only at a special, invitation-only gala on August 30. The court dithered as to which Italian opera should be performed for the public opening, first considering Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (The barber of Seville) and Verdi’s Rigoletto before settling on I Puritani. For a moment, it seemed that Gaetano Donizetti’s comic opera L’elisir d’amore (The elixir of love) would inaugurate the new theater, but it was pushed back to the private performance ten days later. So it was Bellini at the Bolshoi on opening night.

  In Russia, the politics of the theater sometimes mirrors the happenings of history, especially in periods of tumult, of which Russia has had a surfeit. Following Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, deriding the French became modish in the Imperial Theaters. Later in the nineteenth century tastes would turn against the German Empire and Prince Otto von Bismarck. After the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, when Russia flipped over on herself and everything good in the past turned bad, the repertoire transformed as well. Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar morphed into Hammer and Sickle to match Communist aesthetics; Puccini’s Tosca emerged from the Bolshevik coup as The Battle for the Commune.

  But in the war- and revolution-free year of 1856, the bond between art and politics loosened. The choice of I Puritani for the opening of the Bolshoi Theater and crowning of the new sovereign had nothing to do with the world beyond the stage. It was picked simply because it was the newest on the list of available operas, and because it would be sung by the popular Bosio, star of an Italian opera troupe in St. Petersburg. The plot is actually anti-aristocratic. Unlike the Soviets, however, who scoured libretti, listened to music, and looked at dance for signs of sedition, Tsar Alexander II feared nothing from the theater. The sordid goings-on in Bellini’s scores, or anyone else’s, posed no threat to imperial rule.

  Likewise the first ballet selected to honor the monarch was meant to showcase a talented performer: La vivandière (1844) featured Fanny Cerrito, an Italian ballerina of marvelous technique, delightful in her execution of batterie, as precise in her rapid turns as a spinning top. Her partner—the no less renowned dancer, choreographer, and ballet master Arthur Saint-Léon—was also her husband. Her steps are lost to time, but one of the group dances, a pas de six, survives in Saint-Léon’s notation, and offers a sense of his impressive technique.5 Cerrito played the early nineteenth-century Napoleonic equivalent of a Girl Friday, a maiden who serves French soldiers by writing letters on their behalf, bandaging their wounds, and managing a canteen. She sells food and provisions to the troops at a discount, but preserves her virtue; the soldiers covet what is forbidden to everyone but her true love, the tavern-keeper Hans. Army life did not allow for easy pliés, and Cerrito was required to execute hard one-foot landings with jugs and utensils strapped around her waist.

  Press reports about the new Bolshoi were effusive. Reviewers gushed about the expansive façades, the intricate mosaics on the lobby floors, and the mélange of “floral ornaments, rocailles, cartouches, meshes, rosettes and plaits” in the tiers.6 Cavos had reimagined the Bolshoi in a “Byzantine-Renaissance style,” with entrance columns of milk-white limestone, loges of crimson velvet, and foyers full of fitted mirrors and grisaille squares.7 The seats were padded with horsehair and coconut matting—the latest in comfort. Fine gold leaf overlaid papier-mâché moldings in the auditorium. Ingredients for the gilding included clay, egg, and vodka. Paintbrushes were fashioned from the fine hair of blue (perhaps brown) squirrels’ tails, excellent for the application of thick, rich color.

  The history of the nation was allegorized on the second curtain, painted with the image of a crucial event from 1612. In that year, according to Kremlin legend and official propaganda, the Russian masses united for the first time against their enemies, a band of Poles and Lithuanians. Besides fouling Russian land, the invaders sought to convert the peasants and merchants to Catholicism, a fate considered worse than death. A salt peddler named Kuzma Minin and a prince named Dmitri Pozharsky prevented the tragedy. The curtain shows the two men entering Moscow on horseback, intent on inciting the people to rebel. The message was as obvious in 1856 as it is today: As long as we are united, we the Russian people can defeat anyone. Foreign occupiers will always be expelled, and those who treacherously side with them will likewise be vanquished. The curtain elicited praise from both Russian critics and those foreigners who saw in it less an endorsement of xenophobia than an homage to Italian theatrical design. It hung in the Bolshoi Theater until 1938, when Stalin decided to make 1917, rather than 1612, Russia’s favorite year. The curtain vanished from the premises. Politics mandated its restoration in 2011 based on a sketch and a photograph preserved in the Bolshoi Theater Museum. Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin lieutenants have invoked the year 1612 to stoke fears of foreign invasion and arouse a nationalist spirit while tempering dissent.

  For his contribution to the nation, Cavos was awarded the cross of Vladimir the Great, ruler of Kievan Rus, and granted an annual pension of 6,000 French francs. A loge in the theater was dedicated to him after his death.

  TEN DAYS AFTER the public opening, the Bolshoi was handed over to the nobility for a private performance, an occasion like no other. On August 30, 1856, the Imperial Court aspired to make a spectacular international impression, celebrating its own reconstitution as much as the theater’s with an exclusive gala performance. Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d ’amore offered the kind of preposterous bubbliness that the tsar enjoyed, and spread a message of goodwill to all those in attendance. As one expert on his reign notes, it expressed things close to his heart: “sentimental faith in the magical power of love, creating good feelings and healing wounds—joy and infatuation conquering disbelief and making for a sense of common humanity.”8

  A reporter on hand that evening, William Howard Russell, described the event in a feature piece for the Times of London. He extolled the pale and delicate sea-green interior, the orange- and fuchsia-perfumed side rooms, and the sparkling and twinkling from the rays of candles that proved too dazzling, in their aggregate, for sustained viewing. He gushed about the diadems donned by the noble ladies in the loges, the discipline exhibited by the officers of the parterre, including their perfectly harmonized cheers when the tsar and tsarina arrived at eight thirty p.m., and the exotic distinctiveness of the Turks, Georgians, and others in attendance from across Eurasia. The notion that they were all a part of the ever-expanding Russian Empire, an empire with coasts on the Pacific and Arctic Oceans as well as the Baltic, Black, and Caspian Seas, shocked even its rulers. Uniforms of white and gold, blue and silver, crimson, black, and scarlet turned the parterre into the richest of flower beds. Russell described the scene to his British readers:

  A Roman amphitheater was probably grander, but it could not have been a more brilliant sight. A gorgeous and magnificent crowd filled the theatre, but the arrangements were so good that there was neither hustling, confusion, nor noise. There were no ladies in the pit, so that the effect of the many splendid uniforms was homogenous, but the front rows of the first tier of boxes were occupied by the mistresses of creation in full dress—such diamonds, in coronets, circlets, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, brooches, in all the forms that millinery and jewellery could combine those precious stones they were present—looking their best, and filling the house with an atmosphere of flashes and sparks in the rays of the wax lights. The grand ladies of the Russian Court … were there, rich with the treasures won, in ages past, by their hard-pated ancestors from Tartar, Turk, or Georgian [lands]. Some of these ladies are very beautiful, but if there could be
any portion of womankind which, as a rule, could be said not to be exquisite and of resplendent charms, it might be safely affirmed that they lived in Russia. The exceptions to such a remark are very conspicuous. There is one little head which always attracts any eyes that may be near it—a baby mignon face, with the most peach-like colour, enveloped in a wild riotous setting of flaxen hair, which bursts from all control of band or circlet, and rushes in a flood over the shoulders. It is such a face as inspired the artists who operated on old Dresden china, and it belongs to a young Russian Princess, who has just burst upon the Moscow world. Another lady near her is Juno herself—a statelier and more perfect beauty could not be seen. A little further on there is a lovely young Moldavian, married to a Russian Prince, who has just been sent off to the Caucasus—three months after the wedding … But the catalogue … must cease here for the present, for the crowd in the pit increases, and the Emperor may be expected every moment. In the front rows of the pit are placed the Generals and Admirals, Privy Councilors, Officers of State, Chamberlains, and personages of the Court. Behind these are similar officers, mingled together with members of the foreign missions, and the strangers who were invited to be present. There were not half-a-dozen black coats in this assemblage of distinguished people; all the rest were in full uniform. Lord Granville was already in his box in the grand row on the left-hand side of the Emperor’s state box. M. de Morny and the French Embassy were placed in the box on the right of the Tsar’s. The other Ministers and Ambassadors were provided with places in the same row, and the attachés who had no room above were accommodated with seats in the pit. It was past 8 o’clock when the Emperor appeared, and the instant he was seen the whole of the house rose as if thrilled by an electric flash, and cheered most vehemently again and again. The Tsar and Tsarina bowed, and every salutation was the signal for a repetition of the enthusiastic uproar, through which at last the strains of “God Save the Tsar” forced their way, and the audience resumed their places.9

  Ultimately the excited reporter ran out of space, so promised his readers another, even more detailed, chronicle of the occasion. Famous for reporting on the Crimean War, Russell had permission to write at length for the Times, and his article on the Bolshoi ran on to 5,250 words before even mentioning the bad manners of the Americans in attendance or considering the difference between the polonaise as performed in Russia and its birthplace in Poland. Also omitted were the Russian medals and ribbons pinned to the chests of the ambassadors, the tiaras that blocked the views of the plumes, the jealousies and wounded feelings occasioned by a St. Petersburg princess being seated beneath a certain Moscow countess. More important—most important—was the building itself. The Bolshoi was now an Imperial Theater in appearance, not just in name.

  Before the century’s end, it would host two more coronations: that of Tsar Alexander III in 1883 (for which Tchaikovsky provided the 1812 Overture, among other ostentatious pièces d’occasion) and Tsar Nicholas II in 1896. The coronation in 1883 came after an assassination. Alexander II was killed by a bomb in St. Petersburg thrown by a member of a band of anti-autocratic zealots called People’s Will. He had survived several assassination attempts in the past, but in this instance two explosives were lobbed at him; the second landed at his feet as he emerged from his carriage, shredding his legs. His death brought an end to a period of economic, agricultural, and social reforms, including the emancipation of the serfs (motivated by the tsar’s reading of the agrarian populist Alexander Herzen) and a certain degree of freedom of expression in the press and the universities. The reforms had not gone far enough, however. Liberated serfs were dragooned into leasing land from their former masters or reenslaved in factories. Activists seeking to form labor unions or political parties were jailed or killed, adding fuel to the fire that would become the 1917 Revolution. There was no thought of issuing a constitution or forming a parliament. The strife at the fringes of the empire spread to the center.

  The long-delayed ascension of his son became the subject of anxious speculation, but after months of seclusion, Tsar Alexander III was enthroned without incident. A secret police force, the okhranka, had been formed for the purpose of infiltrating and liquidating subversive organizations. The coronation ceremonies at the Bolshoi affirmed, in response to the terrorist violence, an abiding love of the nation, the Russian Orthodox Church, mystical traditions, and the “Muscovite origins of imperial power.”10 During the festivities, Alexander III represented himself as a heroic knight amid the boyars, but for him, as for his predecessor and successor, such “people-mindedness” (as would become the watchword of the Soviets) ended as soon as he and his massive entourage returned to St. Petersburg. The tsar imposed a series of reforms that sought to assert the power of the throne at the expense of the people—at least those people who did not suit the definition of a “true Russian.”11 There were pogroms. Jews, the scapegoats of Russian history, were banished from Moscow, their expulsion hastening after Alexander III appointed his brother, Grand Duke Sergey Aleksandrovich, the governor general of the city in 1891. The lore surrounding the derring-do of the Don Cossacks, perennial heroes of Russian history, was promoted, and new churches were built in ancient Russian Orthodox style. Even the language changed, as archaic eighteenth-century expressions became popular again in the press and bureaucratic missives.

  For the 1883 coronation, the Bolshoi hosted a partial performance of the 1613 coronation scene from Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar, composed in the first half of the nineteenth century. The intentional mixing of politics and theater featured marching soldiers, hundreds of choristers, and a late-arriving, dry-throated soprano in peasant garb. She had been circling the theater in her carriage, trying in vain to enter past police and soldiers blocking the doors. Having stood up the tsar, already seated in the central loge with his family, she arrived onstage in hysterics, trembling from head to toe and crying, “Ice! Ice!” to the stagehands, hoping to cool down her head, if not her vocal cords.12 The opera got going, and, at the patriotic highpoint, the floorboards of the stage shook to the strains of “Glory, glory, holy Russia!” There followed the performance of an allegorical ballet by Marius Petipa, Night and Day (Noch’ i den’), about renewal. The Queen of the Night, Evening Star, comets, planets, ferns, swan maids, mermaids, and dryads join hands in the first half; then the Queen of the Day cavorts with the Morning Star, birds, butterflies, bees, and flies. An assortment of nationalities comprising the Russian Empire appears—from Finns and Georgians and Poles to Don Cossacks and Siberian shamans, each greeting the dawn as a symbol of the coronation. Mother Russia enters as a plump matron in the middle of the friendship-of-the-peoples round dance. It was an Olympian spectacle, combining ballet, parade, and circus with soldiers in review. The St. Petersburg ballerina Ekaterina Vazem notes, however, that the “ballet’s music, written as usual by Minkus, lacked for quality.”13

  The opulent ceremonial performance was a signal, if still faint, of things to come. It demonstrated that the Bolshoi, the Imperial Theater of the ancient Russian capital, could serve ideological purposes. The divertissement at the Bolshoi blurred the identities of the ethnicities in a simulacrum of autocratic subjugation. Night and Day offered a parable of national unity and the power of the empire. Tsar Alexander III ended up being sufficiently flattered by the ballet in his honor to order it performed again two days later, exclusively for his family.

  AFTER THE IMPERIAL INSIGNIAS were removed from the entrance and the roof, the Bolshoi Theater catered once again to Moscow audiences and their more down-to-earth tastes. Although Moscow and St. Petersburg had been connected by rail since 1851, the bumpy two-day ride never brought the cities closer together. Moscow retained its essential rustic character even after having been rebuilt post-Napoleon. It was grittier, grimier, and, being under the control of merchant guilds, more thuggish than the imperial capital to the north. As the ancient capital, it nonetheless considered itself the real, true Russian center, and put its own stamp on Russian culture, bui
lding a monument to the writer Pushkin before St. Petersburg did, for example, even though Pushkin did not spend much time in Moscow. The Imperial Gendarmerie maintained order (and, beginning with Tsar Alexander III, supervised the okhranka secret-police station). Bulbous cathedral domes floated above narrow, curving, muddy, smelly streets; fish and game markets supplied coarse meals for raucous subterranean kabaki (taverns) and quieter street-level inns (traktirï). There were, roughly speaking, two separate citizenries. Nobles of ancient lineage, privileged members of the Table of Ranks, successful merchants, and affluent industrialists frequented social clubs and arts salons, dined on haute cuisine in fine French restaurants, and strolled through the pleasure gardens of Moscow. The workers—poor, illiterate, or semiliterate—lived their short lives in modest dwellings lit by candles and kerosene lamps. For both classes, and the functionaries mediating between them, there were holiday treats, street fairs, and the rituals of the liturgical calendar. Love for their red-bearded, hard-drinking ruler equaled, among Muscovites, love for the Russian Orthodox Church.

  The monarchists of St. Petersburg held Tsar Alexander III just as close to their hearts but the Church at greater distance. Government ministers, bureaucrats, and courtiers were more secular in outlook, and indeed colder and more hypocritical in their interactions than the salt-of-the-earth types of Moscow. The residents of St. Petersburg imagined their imperial capital, an improbable network of palaces and canals spilling into the Gulf of Finland, as a portal to Europe. Moscow, in contrast, hewed close to its Eastern, Byzantine roots and expected as much of its ballet and opera house, despite its neoclassical façade.

  Cavos had transformed the Bolshoi in grand aristocratic style, but Moscow audiences still wanted to be entertained. Comedies, folk fare, and bric-a-brac divertissements remained as popular as ever. Ballets that had succeeded in St. Petersburg fell flat in Moscow, even when the same performers were involved. Ballet master Alexei Bogdanov, a St. Petersburg transplant, tried staging spectacular ballets-féeries, including one that received close scrutiny from the censors: The Delights of Hashish, or The Island of Roses (Prelesti gashisha, ili ostrov roz, 1885). The initial buzz from this colorful, colonialist banquet filled the Bolshoi for two or three performances, after which ticket sales sagged and the production had to be struck. The reviews were slight and focused more on the plot, lighting, and chemical explosions than on the dancing. Teatral’nïy mirok (Theatrical world) praised Bogdanov for his “energetic” approach to the group dances, including the “Dance of the Bees” that was performed by the youngest members of the cast, and credited him with “at last raising up the fallen art of choreography in Moscow.” The Delights of Hashish “caused a furor.”14 The group dances earned the adjective “tasteful” in an article in Teatr i zhizn’ (Theater and life), which does not much assist the cause of choreographic reconstruction.15 Elsewhere, the corps de ballet was likened to a “bouquet of assorted roses.” The reviewer appreciated strong Italianate emotions in dance and lauded the budding talents of the Bolshoi Ballet. Lidiya Geyten indulged the Africa of the imperial Russian imagination, performing “the kaftan dance with the wild passion and the fire of an actual African.”16 Some of the other solos, such as the “Chinese” dance, were deemed a pleasant surprise, suggesting that worse had been expected of Bogdanov.