Apollo’s Angels

by Jennifer Homans

  The Cecchetti family knew Manzotti well and in 1883 Enrico performed Excelsior in Bologna. From 1885 to 1887 he worked closely with Manzotti at La Scala, performing original roles in Amor and several other ballets. He became one of Manzotti’s chosen stagers: one of the extant scores (notes on steps and choreographic formations) for Excelsior is in Cecchetti’s hand, and he was an expert in mounting and performing the ballet. Short and thickly built, his talents lay especially in mime (his hands were said to be unusually expressive) and virtuosic dancing. In 1887 Cecchetti traveled to St. Petersburg to mount an abridged production of Excelsior at the popular Arcadia Theater. The Russian authorities were so impressed that he was invited to take a position as principal dancer and second ballet master to Marius Petipa at the tsar’s Imperial Theaters. He accepted and would spend most of his career dancing with and for Russians: he was employed by the Imperial Theaters for fifteen years, until 1902, and from 1910 to 1918 he worked with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. He toured with Pavlova and later established a school in London (a favorite among Russian émigrés) before at last returning to La Scala in the final two years of his life.

  Cecchetti was not alone: the “Italian invasion,” as it was known in Russia at the time, included Virginia Zucchi (1849–1930), Pierina Legnani (1863–1923), and Carlotta Brianza (1867–1930), all of whom were experienced Excelsior dancers, and all of whom spent significant parts of their careers in St. Petersburg. Brianza would be the original Sleeping Beauty, and Legnani would become the swan queen in Swan Lake. Italian dancers (like their French and Scandinavian counterparts) had always been drawn to Russia by the wealth and resources of the Russian court. But in the 1880s and 1890s, for reasons we shall discover, their influence proved decisive. Indeed, Russian ballet was born in part of a dying Italian art.

  It was a stunning paradox: Manzotti’s meretricious and bombastic dances—which had pushed ballet as far from antiquity as kitsch could take it—would become a vital element in the making of high Russian classicism. Viganó and Blasis had tried to build Italian ballet “up” to a neoclassical art, but their innovations had instead fortified the “grotesque” base. Italian ballet thus reverted to a bigger, brasher version of what it had always been: virtuosic and itinerant. Excelsior dancers were a curious breed. They boasted supreme technique and an animated bravura style, but they were also deeply insensitive—or uninterested—in matters of taste and art. They had forfeited their claim to classicism, but the echo of Viganó and Blasis remained: by rights, ballet really should have been Italian. And in deeply ironic ways, it was: for dance was not always, or even primarily, renewed from above, and there was something about Italian dancers’ bold insouciance and unbridled ambition that spoke for a generation. On its own, however, Italian ballet was self-destructive. It would take the Russian court, with its confident and autocratic discipline, to fashion brash Italian virtuosity into an elevated and sublime art.

  *Mieroslawski (1814–1878) was a Polish patriot and revolutionary leader who played a prominent role in the January Uprisings against Russian occupation in 1863. Italians also knew him for his work with Garibaldi.

  The receptive character of the Slavs, their femininity, their lack of initiative and their great capacity for assimilation and adaptation, made them pre-eminently a people that stands in need of other peoples; they are not fully self-sufficing.…There is no people which might more deeply and completely absorb the thought of other peoples while remaining true to itself.

  —ALEXANDER HERZEN

  The Russian school is the French school, only the French have forgotten it.

  —PEHR CHRISTIAN JOHANSSON

  THE GREAT there was no ballet at all in Russia. Indeed, it is worth recalling just how isolated and culturally impoverished the country was before Peter came to power in 1689. For centuries, church and state had been inseparable: the Russian tsar was an Orthodox prince and Moscow was cast as a “third Rome.” Western Europe went through the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the scientific revolution, but Russia remained cut off and bound up in the timeless liturgies of the Orthodox faith. It had no universities and no secular literary tradition; its art and its music were almost exclusively confined to icons and sacred songs. Musical instruments were considered sinful, and dance was something peasants did. Court ballet did not exist.

  In striking contrast to their west European counterparts, the Russian elite lived unadorned lives: they dwelt in wooden houses and slept on benches (or on top of the warm stove) and their clothing and manners resembled those of peasants: rough and indecorous. Men coveted long and bushy black beards, which they took to be a sign of godliness and masculinity (God was bearded and women couldn’t grow one). Only demons were depicted as clean-shaven. Fancy foreign dress was prohibited, and foreigners living in Moscow were quarantined in their own “German Suburb,” a ghetto of European culture coveted by a few and dismissed by most. Muscovite society was not society in any form recognizable in the West: it was rigidly segregated by sex and men and women mixed little in public; on those rare occasions when they did, ladies were expected to be quiet and bashful with downcast eyes. In the mid-seventeenth century a trickle of Western theater and fashion (mostly Polish) began to seep in, but nothing could have been further from the Russian cultural imagination than the refined artifice and etiquette of classical ballet.

  With Peter the Great, however, all of this changed. Peter despised the claustrophobic rituals that governed life in old Muscovy: he gravitated to the German Suburb, learned Dutch and German, took fencing and dancing lessons, and wore Western clothes. He was clean-shaven. But this was only the beginning: what Peter wanted for himself he also wanted for Russia. In the early years of the eighteenth century he thus invented and planned an ambitious purpose-built and European-style city: St. Petersburg. Constructed from the ground up by sheer force of labor and at great human cost on a swampy, barren strip of land at the westernmost edge of the country, the city was a self-conscious metaphor for Peter’s Westernizing project. The idea was not only to shift the country’s center of gravity away from Moscow and “open a window” onto the West; it was to radically re-create Russian society in a European image—to make Russians into Europeans.

  To this end Peter subordinated the Church, incorporating Orthodox institutions into his own vastly expanded bureaucratic apparatus and placing himself, as tsar and emperor (he was the first to take the title), at the apex of Russian society. Indeed, Peter the Great imagined himself as a Russian Louis XIV: the Peterhof Palace was modeled on Versailles, with gardens and vistas precisely measured to match the original. And although Peter himself never learned to speak French, his courtiers—corralled at his new court in his new city—were encouraged to do so. It was an extraordinary cultural transformation: by the end of his reign the Russian elite had relegated their native tongue to the backwoods of their imaginations. Decrees in the early years of the century forced the point home on other fronts too: Western dress was mandated and beards prohibited for all men, regardless of rank. State inspections were routinely conducted and fines—and eventually a beard tax—levied on those who failed to conform.

  Peter controlled his courtiers through strict rules and hierarchies. The Table of Ranks, established in 1722, created fourteen civil ranks (based on German titles) each with its own special uniform; etiquette up and down the ladder was formally prescribed and carefully observed. To acquire proper comportment and manners, aristocratic children were taught to dance from an early age by French and Italian ballet masters, and courtiers were required to learn the latest dances for balls and ceremonial events. The rules were carefully laid out in The Honorable Mirror of Youth, a compilation of Western courtesy books designed to educate courtiers in the intricacies of refined behavior, including dancing. And because foreignness conferred authority, Peter arranged marriages for his children to European nobility and made his own personal life a parable of Westernization: he sent his first wife, who hated his modernizing ideas, to a monastery and married a Lith
uanian peasant girl who successfully recycled herself into a paragon of elegance and fashionable beauty. Peter crowned her empress of Russia.

  Classical ballet thus came to Russia as etiquette and not as art. This mattered: ballet was not initially a theatrical “show” but a standard of physical comportment to be emulated and internalized—an idealized way of behaving. And even when it did become a dramatic art, the desire to imitate and absorb, to acquire the grace and elegance and cultural forms of the French aristocracy, remained a fundamental aspiration. Thus from the moment ballet entered Russia, it was inextricably bound up with the Westernizing project that would shape the country’s history for generations to come. It was part of “making Russians European,” and its prestige owed everything to its foreign, and especially Parisian, stature.

  Ballet’s formal artifice, however, like the manners and language of the court, did not come easily to the Russian elite. Indeed, Russian noblewomen were often initially reluctant to dance with foreign men or visiting dignitaries and found it difficult to overcome what one Western observer described as “their in-born Bashfulness and Awkwardness”—not to mention their gauche manners. A French visitor in the early days of Peter’s reign noted that when he greeted a Russian lady at court in the French custom, she downed a cup of vodka to his health. European etiquette and dance were deeply alien—a foreign language—and it was difficult for Russians to reproduce, as one historian has put it, a “convincing cultural accent.”1

  In private moments even the most accomplished courtiers often reverted to Russian ways. Many elegant homes built after a Western fashion had separate quarters with a stove and icons and warm comfortable carpets instead of cold marble floors. French observers were especially quick to note the split personality—the strange grafting of West onto East—in the minds and bodies of the Russian elite. In the early nineteenth century Alphonse de Custine commented on the “stiff and constrained” carriage and manners of Russian courtiers, who seemed to him at once uncannily Parisian and utterly contrived; and when Théophile Gautier attended a ball at the Winter Palace some years later he was amazed to see a grande dame of “Orthodox Petersburg” dancing a refined polonaise (a dance of Polish and, by then, Parisian vintage) with a Mohammedan prince: “under the white glove of civilization,” he famously noted, “is concealed a little Asiatic hand.” But it was Tolstoy in War and Peace who perhaps best captured the divided life of the Russian aristocracy. In her truest moment, Natasha, the French-educated “little countess, reared in silk and velvet,” drops her Parisian airs and spontaneously breaks into an authentic Russian folk dance. She has never seen this dance before but intuitively knows its “inimitable, unteachable, Russian gestures”: she stands, arms to the side, and instinctively makes “the movements of her shoulder and waist” that reveal “all that was in … every Russian soul.”2

  Besides court etiquette, ballet had two other related points of entry into Russian culture. The first was military. The state ballet school in St. Petersburg (which would later become the world-renowned Imperial Theater School) was established well before the Imperial Theaters themselves and had its origins not in the ballroom but with the Imperial Cadet Corps, itself modeled on German and French institutions. In 1734 the French ballet master Jean-Baptiste Landé took up a position there teaching young cadets, and Empress Anna was so impressed with the results that she agreed to establish a formal school of dance. Four years later Landé began with twenty-four children, all sons and daughters of palace servants. He was drawing on a long west European tradition: the connection between ballet and fencing, and between dance and military maneuvers more generally, reached back at least to the Italian Renaissance, but nowhere was the connection more strongly established and sustained than in Russia. The training of dancers there (to this day) would be characterized by military-style discipline and regimentation, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long after such practices had been abandoned in the West, Russian ballets featured full-scale battles, staged with the help of military experts (and hundreds of extras) with “troops” of dancers in rigid lines and arrayed in symmetrical formations.

  Perhaps more surprisingly, Western ballet resonated with Eastern Orthodoxy. The Russian Church was (and remains) opulently theatrical: faith has less to do with doctrine than spectacle. It is best seen and heard, rather than read or talked about. Indeed, anyone who has attended an Orthodox service will immediately sense the parallels with the theatrical arts: the crowd of worshipers gathered in attentive suspense awaiting the ritual opening of beautifully decorated gates and doors, the unveiling and revelation of sacred icons of great richness and splendor (gold, deep blues, inlay), and above all the power of music and visual beauty to draw the “audience” into a concrete but otherworldly life. Echoes of this kind of liturgy could also be found in the ceremonies enacted at court. The entrance of the tsar to a ball or formal function, to take but one example, was an elaborate and highly staged affair in which a crowd of attentive courtiers, all with assigned roles, stood in awe as the magnificent ballroom doors were thrown open to reveal the Orthodox prince and his entourage in their dazzling splendor; a full procession with musical accompaniment followed. It was but a step from these religious and courtly rites to the lavish theatrical productions that would grace the Russian ballet stage.

  In 1766 the empress Catherine the Great, who ruled Russia from 1762 until her death in 1796, created the Imperial Directorate, formally establishing three state theaters in the capital city of St. Petersburg: a Russian troupe (considered the least important because it was not foreign), a French drama company, and a Franco-Italian opera and ballet (which would later become the Maryinsky and then, in the Soviet period, the Kirov Ballet). At first, performances were held at a variety of imperial venues, but in 1783 the Bolshoi Stone Theater was built to house opera and ballet (not to be confused with the later Bolshoi Theater in Moscow). The new theater rivaled any in Paris, Vienna, or Milan: it held some two thousand people, and by the early nineteenth century seating followed a strict social hierarchy. High officials, officers, and Imperial Guards occupied the front orchestra, while lesser officials were relegated to the tiers; ladies and families took up the loges; clerks, lackeys, servant girls, valets, and artisans packed themselves into the galleries. Thus the ballet was not (as is commonly assumed) performed exclusively for the benefit of a courtly aristocratic elite. To be sure, just as the king shaped public taste in France, so the tsar had supreme authority and audiences carefully followed his lead, but performers also played to this wider society.

  Ballet masters were almost all foreign. It was a familiar cast of characters: in 1766 Gasparo Angiolini arrived from Vienna and stayed on and off for over ten years. Noverre’s student Charles LePicq was invited to stage his mentor’s Jason and Medea in 1789, and a steady flow of French-trained ballet masters followed throughout the nineteenth century, including Charles-Louis Didelot, Jules Perrot, Arthur Saint-Léon, Pehr Christian Johansson (August Bournonville’s former student), and Marius Petipa. As we have seen, dancers came too: Louis Duport, Marie Taglioni, Fanny Elssler, and dozens of other less well-known French, Italian, German, and Scandinavian performers. They came for the money: St. Petersburg was notoriously frozen and dirty, but as one ballet master explained, “the pay is really good.” Yet there was more to Russia’s allure than cold, hard cash: the Imperial Theaters had tremendous resources, and the simple fact of being foreign gave ballet masters a stature and degree of artistic authority few could hope for back home.3

  That was St. Petersburg. Moscow was an entirely different case. It faced resolutely east: the spiritual home of “Holy Rus,” it was dominated by its merchants and traders, many of them Old Believers who held fast to their Orthodox faith and stubbornly resisted change. Industrious and inbred, the Muscovite elite did not aspire to speak foreign languages nor did they evince much interest in French etiquette and dancing. It was thus fitting that in Moscow the Imperial Theaters were established later and had weak tie
s to the court. Indeed, the origins of what would eventually become the great Bolshoi Ballet lay in an impoverished orphanage and the work of the Italian dancer Filippo Beccari, hired in 1773 to teach its foundling children. Later a quirky Englishman, Michael (Menkol) Maddox—magician, mechanic, and set decorator—incorporated these orphans, along with unemployed actors and some serfs belonging to a friend, into a ragtag theatrical troupe. The enterprise limped along, barely able to foot its bills, until it was finally taken over in 1805 by the state and eventually brought under the umbrella of the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg. For the rest of the nineteenth century, it would remain a poor relation to the more splendidly appointed St. Petersburg company; it had fewer resources and a less formal and more Russian and folk-dance-inspired character. Its moment would come later, in the twentieth century, when Moscow reclaimed its place as the country’s political and cultural capital.

  The Imperial Theaters were thus created by the empress: they were the stepchildren of the Russian state. But they also had other, far more modest origins in the “serf theaters” run by rich landowners on their country estates. Here we come to the properly Russian roots of the imperial ballet, the native aspect of this otherwise imported French and Italian, urban and court art. For unlikely as it may seem, the character and development of ballet in Russia—in spite of its Parisian airs—were also inextricably entwined with the country’s most entrenched and rural institution: serfdom. The Imperial Theaters of Moscow and St. Petersburg were both fed by serfs from serf theaters, and it was this strange social and political phenomenon that provided a blueprint for the art.