One particularly positive consequence of the fire was the decision to build the New Hermitage, which would house the imperial collection. While the palace reconstruction was under way, Nicholas visited King Ludwig I of Bavaria in Munich and was much impressed by the architectural transformation of the city. Nicholas commissioned Ludwig’s architect, Leo von Klenze, to design the New Hermitage. Building began in 1839 and the museum eventually opened in 1852. An eclectic combination of classical, Renaissance and baroque styles, the museum’s public entrance was a portico supported by ten five-metre-tall granite atlantes. Influenced by von Klenze’s Munich Glyptothek, the first floor of the Hermitage would display antiquities. On the second floor the imperial picture collection would be shown. Nicholas appointed three artists to review and rate the paintings owned by the Crown. Works were to be categorised into four groups: those worthy of display in the New Hermitage, those suitable for hanging elsewhere in the imperial palaces, those to be stored and those of little value. Nicholas liked to interfere and was – according to Fedor Bruni, director of the Hermitage between 1849 and 1864 – very stubborn. Against advice, the emperor sold off well over a thousand paintings, including some of the collection’s finest.61 As for Bruni, he never lived up to his early promise as a painter. His large canvases lacked the ideological or political undertones of his contemporaries, Ivanov and Bryullov, and, among his many decorations for St Isaac’s, only The Flood reveals great originality.
On the Neva from right to left: the Winter Palace, the Small Hermitage, Old Hermitage (New Hermitage hidden behind) and the Winter Palace of Peter I.
Leo von Klenze’s Greek-style portico at the entrance to the New Hermitage, built between 1839 and 1852.
Culture in the capital – imported and indigenous – was buzzing. In 1832, Molière was performed at the French theatre in the presence of Nicholas I, and Carl Maria von Weber’s nationalistic Die Freischütz was presented at the German theatre. Shakespeare was played, but any work treating an attack on authority-such as Julius Caesar- was forbidden. Pushkin’s masterpieces were published in the early 1830s, followed by Gogol’s Petersburg Tales in 1835. His play The Revizor or The Government Inspector was performed in the spring of 1836 at Carlo Rossi’s magnificent Alexandra Theatre – named in honour of Alexandra Feodorovna, the tsar’s wife and ‘one of the most marvellous jewels of the Nevsky Prospekt’. The Government Inspector seemed an audacious piece to perform in front of a tsar obsessed with disciplining his unruly empire. Watching a revival in the 1850s, an English visitor was astonished that the play was permitted, thinking that ‘pride alone would have prevented such an exposure’ of the ‘extortion and bribery which are . . . truly national’.62 However, in the 1830s Gogol was played for broad comedy. Corrosive insights were cloaked in buffoonery63 and Nicholas enjoyed the first performance so much that he laughed loudly and incessantly. This guaranteed a splendid evening for all, as etiquette dictated that no one could laugh aloud until the emperor was heard to laugh.
In that same year, 1836, Mikhail Glinka – wellspring of Russian opera – premiered Ivan Susanin under the baton of the man who had treated the same subject twenty years earlier, Catterino Cavos. The opera concerned a peasant who, in 1613, diverted Polish troops and saved the life of the founder of the Romanov dynasty, Tsar Mikhail, grandfather of Peter the Great. It was the first Russian opera without spoken dialogue, and the first tragedy. In the Cavos version, Ivan Susanin survives, whereas Glinka has the peasant die to save the tsar. The emperor attended rehearsals and shaped elements of the opera to underline the politically useful idea that the tsar is the guardian of the nation and that personal happiness is closely tied to the preservation of autocracy. Renamed A Life for the Tsar by Nicholas, it was to open the opera season every year.64
Musically, St Petersburg established itself as an international venue. Franz Liszt dazzled audiences in April 1842. The pianist was such a showman that he took the novel step of appearing on a stage erected in the centre of the Assembly Hall of the Nobility, from where he played not only pieces written for his instrument, but orchestral and vocal works in bravura piano renditions. He also performed at receptions given by the nobility and was presented to the tsar, who ignored all others present in order to engage the virtuoso in exclusive conversation. Liszt gave six public concerts, including a benefit for a children’s hospital. But when he returned to Petersburg one year later-his impact diminished by the renewed craze for Italian music – he was booked in the smaller Engelhardt Hall.65 Robert Schumann remarked on the dominance of Italian productions and performers when he visited the capital with his wife, Clara, in 1844. More celebrated as a pianist than her husband was as a composer, Clara was invited to perform before the empress. She also entertained the imperial family with a two-hour recital at the Winter Palace and gave a brilliant public concert at the Mikhailovsky Theatre. Hector Berlioz travelled fourteen days through the snows of northern Europe to conduct four concerts in 1847, including two complete performances of his Roméo et Juliette. The critic Vladimir Stasov hailed these as ‘the most magnificent, most crowded, most brilliant and most deafening concerts’66 presented in the capital that season, and Berlioz – who was called back countless times by the appreciative audience – wrote in a letter, ‘I have to come to Russia to hear my favourite work properly played, it has always been more or less ruined everywhere else.’67
Berlioz had met Glinka in Paris three years earlier and was so enthusiastic about his music that he included it in his French concerts and praised it in reviews. Liszt was similarly impressed with this first giant of Russian music.68 In a scene dominated by foreigners, Glinka’s sudden appearance ‘caused the whole city of St Petersburg to begin attending Russian performances’. The young Rimsky-Korsakov recorded that A Life for the Tsar threw him into ‘a veritable ecstasy’ – ‘there were no bounds to my enthusiasm for and worship of this man of genius’.69 Gogol was among those impressed: ‘What an opera you can make out of our national tunes! Show me a people who have more songs! . . . Glinka’s opera is only a beautiful beginning.’70 Apart from folk idioms and melodies, there were the obvious influences of Donizetti and Mozart, but Glinka himself asserted that composers do not create music, the people do. His first opera was one of the first declarations of the new nationalism which would through the arguments between ‘Slavophils’ and ‘Westerners’ – dominate the intellectual debate between St Petersburg’s European modernity and Moscow’s traditional Russian soul.71
Glinka’s second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila – a very free adaptation of Pushkin’s witty mock-heroic poem premiered in 1842. Despite the expectations raised by previews of the score which included piano performances by Franz Liszt, the libretto proved awkward and doomed the opera. The imperial family left the theatre abruptly at the end of the fifth act, and Ruslan gradually disappeared from the repertoire – understandably upsetting the composer. Glinka spat on the ground as he left his ‘vile’ native land to settle in Berlin. After his death, the composer Mily Balakirev gave the first uncut performance of the opera in 1867 and the next generation of Russian composers began to borrow from Glinka. Tchaikovsky called Ruslan ‘the tsar of operas’ and Stravinsky referred to the composer frequently. But in the 1840s, in the climate of growing nationalism, Nicholas surprisingly deserted Russian music and spent large sums on supporting the fashionable Italian opera. Society, so taken with the Italians, turned its back on what it took for boorishness in Glinka. In 1843, the Russian opera lost its theatre to the Italians and was forced to settle in an old circus, which burned down in 1859.
Stimulated by the international talent that was appearing in St Petersburg, ballet was developing swiftly. By the time Théophile Gautier visited in the late 1850s, he observed that it was ‘not an easy matter for a dancer to win applause in St Petersburg; the Russians are experts in such matters, and the scrutiny of their opera glasses dreaded’. A leading figure in French ballet during the preceding decades, Gautier found Petersburg theatres to be well equipped
with flies and traps capable of changing scene efficiently. He observed that the Imperial Ballet School was training ‘remarkable pupils’ and their corps de ballet was ‘unequalled for the ensemble precision’. Russian dancers were skilled and professional, never ‘giggling or glancing amorously at the spectators’, as they often did in Paris.72
The publication of the letters of the French choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre made a great impact on the development of the dramatic nature of Russian ballet. Noverre asserted that technique was only a means to an end and suggested that the stiff, restrictive costumes should be modified. Indeed, the frontiers of visual respectability were being tested by Petersburg’s ballet in the early nineteenth century. Heavy, cloaking costumes were replaced by the transparent net used by French companies, and became progressively shorter. Later in the century, Tchaikovsky despaired of the vulgar young dandies who went to the ballet to ogle the legs of the girls.73 Young male theatregoers fell in love with actresses and dancers, screaming at their favourites, congregating at stage doors and showering their idols with flowers and self-indulgent poetry. 74 Pushkin’s Onegin – like the poet himself – was infatuated with the Russian prima ballerina Avdotya Istomina, finding it impossible to disentangle the dancer from the dance.75
Training in ballet is very much about the pupil-teacher relationship, and Petersburg was blessed to have a succession of remarkable ballet masters. The ‘fiery and unpredictable’ Charles-Louis Didelot-ballet master from 1801 to 1811-trained Istomina. Jules Perrot, who had been a pupil of the celebrated Vestris, came to Petersburg as a ballet master in 1851 and married the Russian ballerina Capitoline Samovskaya. The great giant of Russian ballet, the dancer and choreographer Marius Petipa, arrived in the Russian capital in 1847 and would live on into the twentieth century, providing ballet with some of its greatest and most durable works. Nourishing this developing tradition was the influence of the greatest foreign performers of the age. The ethereal Marie Taglioni, who ‘danced as nightingales sang’, was first seen in Petersburg in 1837, in La Sylphide. Carlotta Grisi – common-law wife of Jules Perrot and the greatest Romantic dancer of the age – became the prima ballerina of the Imperial Theatre in St Petersburg from 1850-53. Gautier co-wrote the libretto of Adolfe Adam’s Giselle for Grisi, but the initial reaction to her performance in Petersburg was cool. Audiences had initially seen the great Austrian dancer Fanny Elssler in the part. While the story of Giselle suggests there are fatal consequences for those who wish to break social ranks, the choreography – forcing dancers to explore the air and defy gravity with their ballon – must have provided a welcome vision of freedom in the capital of Nicholas I.
The tsar’s love of performance and theatre was reflected in a court that took on renewed splendour after the muted celebrations of Alexander’s reign. Nicholas loved chivalry and there were extravagant medieval parades. In 1829, Nicholas celebrated the Festival of the Magic of the White Rose. In 1842, a tournament was held in the Arsenal. His love of dressing-up is recorded in letters of January 1835 and 1836 to his sister, Anna Pavlovna: ‘Our winter has only just begun: yesterday a small masked ball was held to celebrate Twelfth Night; everybody appeared at it in the exact costumes of my father’s time; very funny and very different, almost unbelievable.’ The following year, the guests at the ball numbered between 26,000 and 27,000 and, on that occasion, everybody appeared ‘in the costume of Peter the Great’s time, and the military men looked as droll as possible with the grotesqueness and strangeness of their dress and turn out’.76 Themed celebrations included the ‘Gods of Mount Olympus’, a Chinese masquerade and a Gothic Ball, which made use of the Gothic Banquet Service presented to Nicholas for Christmas 1833. Such festivities were stimulated by the pan-European fad for ‘historicism’ – an obsession with the art, culture and fashion of past epochs.77 Less than a year and a half after fire had gutted the Winter Palace, magnificent balls resumed, always opening with the polonaise from Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, in which Nicholas led out the wife of the leader of the diplomatic corps, followed by the tsarina escorting the head of the diplomatic corps. After this procession, the dancing followed – quadrilles, waltzes and the mazurka, which, according to Gautier’s expert eye, was ‘danced in St Petersburg with a degree of perfection and elegance unknown elsewhere’. 78
Nicholas noted that Peterhof continued to grow more beautiful and, when the annual ball occurred on 1 July, there were up to 100,000 guests. Custine recorded that on the tsarina’s name-day, ‘6,000 carriages, 30,000 pedestrians and an innumerable number of boats leave St Petersburg to form a camp around’ the palace. During Custine’s visit, while guests dined, a sudden tempest sunk boats sailing in the gulf. The authorities admitted to 200 drowned. Others claimed there were up to 2,000. Custine suggested that the truth would never be known, as the newspapers would not mention an accident that ‘would distress the tsarina and accuse the tsar’. A week later, Custine recorded that the disaster ‘exceeded what I had been led to suppose’ and commented, ‘how little we can be certain of anything’ – facts were ‘considered of no account in Petersburg, where the past and future, like the present, are at the disposal of the master’.79
Adam Menelaws designed a pseudo-Gothic English ‘cottage’ at Peterhof for Alexandra Feodorovna in which the medieval imagery of the interior decoration celebrated her roles as wife and mother. Nicholas cherished the mid-nineteenth-century ideal of the family, but such sentimentality did not stop the ‘tall, athletic’ tsar from enjoying other women as he exerted his autocratic right over the daughters and wives of court officials.80 Neither did this comfortable Christian notion of the family, or the chivalric fantasies of the design, reflect a spirit in tune with the progress that was palpable on St Petersburg streets. At a time when Europe was industrialising, Nicholas ignored the challenge, afraid that a working class that was not tied to the land would undermine Russia’s social structure.
When cholera struck in 1831, one victim was the should-have-been tsar, Constantine. Another was the ageing Adam Menelaws, who had worked for forty-seven years in Russia. The disease was first observed in the Ganges delta of British India in 1817 and spread to southern Russia the same year. A pandemic broke out in 1823, which came to a head in 1830-31. St Petersburg was quarantined, but insufficient controls were set up and the first reported case occurred in the capital on 15 June 1831. A cholera commission was set up the very next day. It prohibited people from drinking canal water, but offered no alternative source. Rumours spread faster than the disease, and the epidemic was gossiped about as a police plot or the work of Russia’s enemies. Doctors – working hard to contain the disease – were dubbed Polish agents. Intransigence confronted ignorance, as anyone resisting the intervention of the authorities was ‘arrested’, thrown into the cholera carts and taken off to be quarantined in lazarettos. Crowds began to block the passage of these wagons, shaking and rocking them, until they spilt those arrested onto the street. Violence flared on Vasilevsky Island and in the administrative district of the Admiralty. On 21 June, a huge crowd stormed a lazaretto on Rozhdestvenskaya Street, but was repulsed by the police. The following day, thousands of people converged on the Haymarket, where the crowd swung out of control. A German doctor was pounded to death and – as guards and police fled – the mob surged into the hospital and liberated the sick. Soldiers, backed by artillery, were sent to put down the riot and rounded up 180 offenders. In mourning for his brother Constantine, Nicholas I was quarantined at Peterhof when the news of the violence reached him. Showing a similar presence of mind and fortitude that marked his first act as tsar in Senate Square in December 1825, the emperor arrived in the capital and toured the city, urging calm and restraint. He spoke to the dangerous Haymarket rabble, calmed the mob and quelled the rioting. It passed into folklore that a quasi-divine intervention by God’s chosen had halted the spread of the disease. Nevertheless, there was a second Russian pandemic from 1847 to 1851, which resulted in more than a million deaths.81
The dec
ade leading up to 1848 – when harvests were bad and protest and revolution rattled the doors of the establishment throughout Europe – was a period of prosperity for St Petersburg merchants. The first railway in Russia, which connected St Petersburg with Tsarskoe Selo, opened in 1838 and, four years later, the Petersburg-Moscow railway was under construction. When it opened in the autumn of 1851, it was the longest double-track railway in the world and carried passengers on a magical overnight journey between the old and new Russias. Currency stabilised in 1843 and, despite Nicholas’s misgivings, industry was expanding. But in the spring of the troubled year of 1848, cholera – which had broken out in Kazan and Orenburg a few months earlier – once again reached the capital and killed one out of every thirty-six inhabitants.82 In the gostiny dvor many shopkeepers ceased to trade, and on 4 July a young lady attending the Smolny Institute recorded in her diary that ‘during the past two weeks, about 100,000 people have fled . . . There are almost no hackney drivers. The city is empty.’.83 A thriving capital with half a million inhabitants was – within a matter of weeks – deserted. Another eyewitness recorded that cholera seized ‘many victims from among the poor. The slightest carelessness in food, the slightest cold was enough to bring it on and after only four or five hours a person would be no more. Terror reigned everywhere throughout the entire summer.’ A decade after the pandemic subsided, the 1861-4 health reforms made some impact, but while western Europe had eradicated cholera by the end of the nineteenth century, Russia – revealing a debilitating sluggishness – suffered pandemics in 1893-4, 1908 and 1925, before the Soviet authorities eventually eliminated it.84
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