Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Reisinger was used to such attacks. He had long been hounded by Moscow critics, who could not accept the presence at the Bolshoi of a provincial ballet master known more for failure than success at his previous post in Leipzig. He was not in demand; no one of influence had lobbied for his hiring, and anti-German sentiment in Russian newspapers was at an all-time high. (It reflected increasing anxieties about the emergence of a powerful, increasingly industrialized German Empire under Prussian leadership.) The machinist Valts took credit for bringing Reisinger’s name to the attention of the minister of the court. They were friends from long back, roomed together near the Bolshoi, and ducked out for pints of beer between acts. Before staging Swan Lake, Reisinger had feigned affection for Russian myth and legend, enduring caustic reviews but bringing in a modest profit with a production of a ballet about an immortal sorcerer (Kashchey the Deathless), to forgettable music by Wilhelm Mühldorfer, a composer he knew from Leipzig. Yuliy Gerber, the Bolshoi Theater principal violinist, also contributed to the score, more successfully. The positive response to Reisinger’s staging of Cinderella in 1871, to a scenario by Valts and music by Gerber, seems to have prompted his full-time appointment as ballet master.75

  In truth, Reisinger filled the position of ballet master from 1873 to 1878 because there was no other choice. Carlo Blasis had resigned without a successor, leaving the ballet rudderless. When the minister of the court, Alexander Adlerberg, visited Moscow in August of 1873, he frowned upon the sloppiness of the Bolshoi corps de ballet. The directorate of the Moscow Imperial Theaters came to the unhappy conclusion that “in the absence of a more capable ballet master,” Reisinger must be hired.76 Even so, the commission overseeing the directorate informed him in 1874 that it had “no intention of renewing” his contract that year.77 Yet he stayed for four more years.

  Reisinger lacked imagination, had a tin ear, and made a hash of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, now considered a musical masterpiece. He survived in Moscow thanks to his skill at selling tickets to stitched-together productions that appealed to the middle class, and his success in cleaning up the ragged, radically underpaid members of the corps de ballet. As a habitual recycler, a champion of ready-made choreography, he could make do with hand-me-down décor shipped to Moscow from St. Petersburg. He was thus the best the Bolshoi could do given its chronic financial constraints.

  As premiered by the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theater in 1877, Swan Lake follows the fate of Odette, a beautiful, guileless princess with an evil stepmother who wants her dead. Odette is protected by the crown that her grandfather gave her, but she and her girlfriends nonetheless live in disguise: at night they are free to be human, inhabiting the ruins of a chapel, while during the day they transform into swans on a lake of tears—the tears shed over the death of Odette’s mother. Odette can be saved by a declaration of love from someone who has never been in love before. That someone is Prince Siegfried. He is aimless, restless, and unattached. His mother, the queen, has made it clear that it is time for him to find a bride, so she arranges a matchmaking ball. Meanwhile, he and a companion, the knight Benno, spy a wedge of swans passing overhead and take to the hunt. The birds settle on the lake of tears, led by a majestic swan wearing a crown. Siegfried prepares to sink an arrow into the swan’s heart, but just then Odette appears, in human form. She explains her sad plight, and Siegfried falls in love with her. They agree that she will attend the ball, where he will choose her as his bride and thus break the spell. Siegfried awaits Odette, but instead her double appears, Odile, an agent of the demonic Baron von Rothbart. Mistaking her for his true love, Siegfried declares Odile his bride. The stage plunges into darkness; the deception is exposed, leaving both Odette and Siegfried shattered. Odette returns to her companions on the lake of tears. Siegfried begs her forgiveness, to no avail, and Odette dies in his arms. Her stepmother, in the guise of a screeching red-eyed owl, flies overhead, gripping the crown that Siegfried, in despair, has thrown into the water. A storm sweeps the thwarted lovers under the waves.

  The plot offers up a series of oppositions: swans versus humans, lake versus castle, day versus night, good versus evil, truth versus deception, freedom versus enslavement. The standard interpretation has Siegfried seeking escape from the oppressive social order through communion with the ideal. Odette is the ideal, Odile her demonic, carnal opposite. But the plot has its excesses and inconsistencies. Why, for example, is the knight Benno involved in the first and second acts of the 1877 version, but not the third and fourth? Why do we need both a sorceress and a demon? Do all the swan maidens share the same curse? The biggest problem is the pitiless ending. In productions after 1877, a solution would be found in the music. Tchaikovsky’s score concludes with an Orphic apotheosis: a halo of strings suggests spirits still commingling after death, even ascending to heaven.

  The inconsistencies suggest decision-making by committee, and it was long unknown who put the scenario together. The story of Swan Lake was published without attribution in Teatral’naya gazeta on October 19, 1876, close to the time of the intended but postponed premiere. There are distant echoes of Ovid in the plot, likewise the Brothers Grimm and the stories of Johann Musäus. A Pushkin poem is a possible source, and details derive from Richard Wagner: the hero is named Siegfried, perhaps after the dragon slayer in Wagner’s Siegfried; the swannishness calls to mind Lohengrin; and when Wagner’s Flying Dutchman declares that the feeling in his breast might not be love but the desire for redemption, he seems to be voicing what Odette’s longing leaves unsaid. Wagner also stages a flood, at the end of Götterdämmerung. Some plot devices can be found in other famous ballets, suggesting that Reisinger might have been the author. (The magic crown that Odette wears can be likened, for example, to the wings of the sylph in La sylphide, which also cannot be removed without causing death.) Tchaikovsky changed the scenario, adding some details in his musical manuscript. Later, his brother Modest, a dramatist and librettist, would revise it, making the concept of self-sacrificing love explicit. The Soviet ballerina Ekaterina Geltser liked to credit her father, a Bolshoi Theater ballet master, with compiling the scenario, but there is no evidence to support her claim beyond a copy of the text with his name on it.

  The author turns out to have been Vladimir Begichev, a scenarist who served as repertoire inspector for the Bolshoi and, for a few months in 1881–82, as the director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. He descended from ancient noble lineage and had studied at Moscow University, holding a series of positions in finance before petitioning for posts in the Imperial Theaters. He had long known Tchaikovsky, who once tutored Begichev’s prodigiously musical stepson. Begichev had earlier arranged for Tchaikovsky to write incidental music for a drama called The Snow Maiden and had nurtured the composer’s interest in ballet as part of an effort to expand the Bolshoi repertoire. A colleague and accurate memoirist claims that “V. P. Begichev himself wrote the scenario for the ballet Swan Lake; the composer endorsed the subject—he initially expressed an interest in a fantasy involving knights—and agreed to compose the music for 800 rubles.”78 Case closed, except for the fact that the comment came with a disclaimer: “If I’m not mistaken.” But he wasn’t. Begichev excluded his name from the published scenario because he did not want to be seen promoting himself in the imperial service. And ballet work lacked prestige.

  The music has a distant antecedent in a children’s ballet that Tchaikovsky improvised into existence in 1871 to entertain his nieces (his sister Sasha’s three daughters). It was rustic theater of the type that had once been performed by serfs, and the composer gamely demonstrated pirouettes amid wooden cutouts of swans. The plot might have been inspired by the Russian folktale The White Duck, about a witch who turns a queen into a duck in order to assume her place on the throne. Four years later, when Tchaikovsky began composing the adult version of Swan Lake, he recycled a violin and cello solo from an abandoned operatic project about a water sprite who, to gain a soul, marries a knight. It was called Undine, and it links Swan Lake
to an entire cosmos of mermaid stories, including Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. The storm and swan song that inspired the ending of the score was inspired by the tales collected by Alexander Afanasiev under the title Poeticheskiye vozzreniya slavyan na prirodu (Poetic Slavic representations of nature, 1866–69).79

  Though he knew some ballet steps, loved Giselle, and did his homework, Tchaikovsky’s knowledge of the genre was slight. The music gets at the theme of longing and the pursuit of an ideal, but it seems to ignore the practicalities of moving bodies around a stage. (The lakeside entrance of the swans and the pas de deux are exceptions.) Even in those places where he seems to be thinking about the dance, the character of the music is at odds with the dramatic situation. The climactic, devastating exposure of Rothbart’s trickery in act 3 is assigned mere seconds of music. The passage is jarring, a dense chromatic field, but much too brief to have an impact. The ballet critic Arlene Croce has deduced that, although Tchaikovsky “sought advice from his choreographer, the kind of advice which he was later to obtain from Petipa for The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker—he appears to have been on his own most of the time. The score, unlike the two later ones, is badly organized in terms of theater logic and stagecraft.”80

  The problem with this assessment is that of the realities of making ballets at the Bolshoi in 1877. It remains unclear what Reisinger, with his limited skills, intended for the music and how he changed that intention. He also had in mind different dramatis personae, and different emphases in each of the acts. The act 1 pas de deux, which later choreographers transposed to the act 3 episode where Odile seduces Prince Siegfried, was assigned in 1877 to Siegfried and a character called “villager 1.”81 The lush violin solo is freighted with the kind of mild dissonances—augmented seconds and augmented fourths—heard in gypsy music, suggesting that Siegfried and the girl had some kind of attraction to each other. Although much is made of the Odette/Odile opposition in the plot, Reisinger, like Tchaikovsky, seems also to have been thinking of an expanded cast wherein this village love interest might parallel a supernatural one. According to the 1877 advertisement, “villager 1” was performed by the Bolshoi soloist Mariya Stanislavskaya, a St. Petersburg–trained ballerina who had been a soloist with the Bolshoi since 1871. Stanislavskaya danced in four of the seven numbers of the original act 1, including two dances not labeled as such in Tchaikovsky’s score: a polka and a gallop. It may be that Reisinger, baffled by the longer dances in the score, dismissed them as “awkward” and replaced them with easier dances taken from other ballets.82 Tchaikovsky objected, and Reisinger relented, but only to a point. The crowd-pleasing, ticket-selling polka and gallop remained.

  The original violin rehearsal score and other materials from the first eight years of the ballet’s existence contain some unusual details, such as the inclusion of a dance for “12 German women” recycled from an 1874 Parisian ballet titled Le tour du monde, after Jules Verne’s great adventure novel Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the world in 80 days, 1873). The second section of the dance is labeled a “Pas de seduction à 8.”83 It became part of Swan Lake on the insistence of another ballet master, Joseph Peter Hansen, who succeeded Reisinger at the Bolshoi.

  Some of the passages that tend to be cut or relocated in current stagings actually took pride of place in the original ballet at the Bolshoi. One such number, critic Alastair Macaulay notes, is the “beautifully poignant andante con moto section, which builds up into a tragic climax that makes the ballet’s scale seem briefly cosmic.” As Macaulay explains, “If you listen to this number with the knowledge that Tchaikovsky intended it as part of the enchantress Odile’s dances, you find it completely transforms our idea of her; this music is as poignant, doom-laden, and huge-scaled as anything written for Odette.”84 Yet just who was meant to dance this poignant episode remains unclear. In the rehearsal score, the andante con moto is called a pas de six. The 1877 playbill, however, lists it as a pas de cinq, and a playbill from 1878 as a pas de dix, performed by the two principles and eight apprentice dancers. In later years it was cut altogether.85 There are other examples of this sort. Indeed, apart from the principal characters, their conflicts, and the appeal of Tchaikovsky’s music, little was or is stable about Swan Lake.

  For all his limitations, Reisinger ended up being easier for Tchaikovsky to work with than the two ballerinas who played the dual role of Odette/Odile.86 The first of them was Pelageya Karpakova, the second Anna Sobeshchanskaya, who took the part of Odette/Odile beginning with the fourth performance on April 28. Neither dancer made much sense of the role, but the 1877 reviews of Swan Lake agree that Sobeshchanskaya, who had long carried the Bolshoi repertoire on her shoulders, was the better actress and technician. The knock against Karpakova had long been the “hesitation” and “lack of power in her movements, of proper speed, exposing a general absence of strength in the muscles.” Her poses and turns lacked definition. A critic had also called them “soft,” ne tverdo, though a typographical error, or joke, spelled the phrase in question net vedro—“not worth a bucket.” Karpakova was beautiful and worked hard, but the critic fretted that time and physical training (vremya i gigienicheskiye sredstva) might not be enough to correct the deficiencies.87

  They were not. Of her performance in Swan Lake, the theatrical observer Dmitri Mukhin remarked that Karpakova “tried as much as she could to represent the fantastic role of the swan, but being a poor mime, she did not leave much of an impression.”88 He also observed that Tchaikovsky’s music vexed most of the cast, being too symphonic, with no clear sense of where numbers began and ended. Then a crucial detail, one that has entered Swan Lake lore as proof of malfeasance in the choice of Karpakova over Sobeshchanskaya for opening night: “It became clear in the staging of [Swan Lake] that some evil force had begun to have an adverse effect on Mlle. Sobeshchanskaya. For her April 28 benefit she had to settle for the fourth performance of this ballet, but as a principal dancer she justifiably should have been given a new ballet to premiere.”89

  The mystery of the casting decision—Why wasn’t Sobeshchanskaya given the premiere?—persisted until Karl Valts stepped forward with an explanation. In his memoirs, he tells the “dark and unpleasant” tale of the rise and fall of Sobeshchanskaya, whose career began like a fairy tale but ended as a nightmare.90 In her youth she had been pampered by high-ranking court officials. She was “brought to the attention of the eternally bored Tsar Alexander II,” who helped to arrange for her to perform in Don Quixote, The Pharaoh’s Daughter, and other ballets by Petipa. She also came to know the governor general of Moscow, Vladimir Dolgorukov. He was well into his sixties and declining physically but decided to try to add her to his collection of mistresses, offering her affection and protection along with his family’s jewels. From Valts’s account, the aged Dolgorukov seems to have imagined Sobeshchanskaya in the role of Madame de Pompadour to his Louis XV. But he did not have the means to maintain the charade. Years of squandering had left him “as poor as a flea.” He had to dip into his sister’s famous collection of diamonds and emeralds to decorate his adopted ballerina.

  Sobeshchanskaya exercised reasonable tact throughout her career but was “careless enough” to fall in love with a young Polish dancer named Stanislav Gillert while Dolgorukov was still in her thrall. Sobeshchanskaya and Gillert had long partnered onstage, and they married. This turn of events did not go over well with Sobeshchanskaya’s influential patron, especially after Gillert began pawning the conspicuous baubles that Dolgorukov had given to the ballerina. “A huge scandal brewed that required great effort to cover up, and Sobeshchanskaya lost her access to the highest spheres,” according to Valts. Her career ended after “just 17 years of service” to the Bolshoi. She forfeited her privileges and was even deprived of a benefit performance to raise money for her retirement. Valts adds that Sobeshchanskaya, the “former glory of the Moscow ballet,” ended up selling candles and soap for a living in the market at Red Square.

  Her sc
andalous marriage supposedly cost her the lead role, and the premiere of Swan Lake on February 20, 1877, featured Pelageya Karpakova with Sobeshchanskaya’s husband, Stanislav Gillert, in the role of Siegfried. Karpakova had a powerful patron of her own. In 1873, she married the head of the Moscow Savings Bank, millionaire Konstantin Milioti. Supposedly thanks to his influence, Karpakova was promoted to first dancer when she might otherwise have been confined to character roles.

  But here lore parts company with truth. Newspaper stories from the months leading up to the premiere of Swan Lake reveal that Milioti was under investigation for embezzlement, meaning he was more of a liability than an asset for his wife. And the romantic intrigue surrounding Sobeshchanskaya did not in fact end her career. During the 1870s, she dominated the Bolshoi stage and retained her coveted position as an official court dancer (much as Tchaikovsky would serve, in his later years, as the official court composer for Tsar Alexander III). In 1876 she was invited to perform for the Danish king, his daughter, and the king and queen of Greece for an event arranged and attended by her former patron, Dolgorukov. Later the same year she danced for Tsar Alexander II during his visit to Moscow. Sobeshchanskaya held enough sway to demand—and obtain—compensation even when performances were canceled or postponed. Like Karpakova, she received numerous gifts from Tsar Alexander II and his family, including jewels and their value in cash on the occasion of the marriage of the tsar’s daughter to the Duke of Edinburgh. Sobeshchanskaya retired with a comfortable pension in a comfortable home. The candle-and-soap story involving her husband is an exaggeration of his failed attempt to operate a candle-and-soap-making factory in St. Petersburg. Sobeshchanskaya ended her career in the teaching studio, where among her students was the first great Soviet ballerina, Ekaterina Geltser. That Sobeshchanskaya was assigned the fourth performance of Swan Lake thus had nothing to do with her personal relationship with Moscow’s governor general. She was just more interested in performing another ballet, La bayadère, which Petipa was preparing for premieres in St. Petersburg and Moscow.