Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today. Simon Morrison

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СКАЧАТЬ contractual bondage he was offering.⁴⁶ Maddox also said that he would hire the dance, music, and acting teachers of the orphanage for the Petrovsky. And he agreed to purchase, for 4,000 rubles, the costumes and props that the orphans had been using.

      The sleight of hand was Maddox’s repeated insistence on also operating the orphanage theater—but not the orphanage theater that had been in operation for the past year. Maddox proposed to expand his public theater empire by selling that structure and opening another one in Kitay-gorod, one that would be bigger, sturdier, and potentially more lucrative. His conniving drew a heated response from a member of the governing board:

      As regards the notion, to my mind unimaginable, that the wooden theater deeded by Her Majesty be sold at a public auction, such stipulations astonish me. For where will our wards, then, perform? Surely not in a theater erected in the auditorium in the orphanage’s central corpus? In that case we would have to invite inside the orphanage the municipal police and defer to its authority, since its presence is required whenever public entertainments are staged, with the entire city flocking to the very locale to which no stranger ought to be admitted.⁴⁷

      Maddox would drop the idea of building a second theater, though not before securing funding for it from the governing board, earning him the reputation of the cleverest of the clever when it came to financial dealings.

      The negotiations lasted several months and were freighted with suspicion by those noblemen who thought the Petrovsky evil, a disreputable place guaranteed to harm the orphans, soil them inside. But after much agonizing and rewriting of the contracts, Maddox got his way: He received fifty ballet pupils, twenty-four actors, and thirty musicians from the orphanage and all but 10 percent of the income from their exploitation. The agreement reflected the notion that bad could be turned into good, that the orphans would cleanse Maddox’s theater, rather than being soiled by it. Such had been the justification for involving the orphanage in the selling of playing cards and pawning of jewelry. These sinful activities became noble when used to rescue homeless children from the streets and enlighten the masses. Maddox too was liberated by the idea that the ends justified the means. Financial crimes became pious in the service of the ballets and operas performed at the Petrovsky, or what Maddox began to refer to as the Grand Theater, “the Bolshoi.”

      Maddox retained his monopoly. Neither the orphanage nor its instructors nor the foreign theatrical troupes that the orphanage had brought to Moscow could operate without his consent. And by bringing the orphanage theater under the aegis of the Petrovsky, Maddox managed to shield himself from his merchant creditors, to whom he owed, they alleged, 90,000 rubles. Some of what he took from them came in the form of cash, but he had also relied on them for building materials and furniture. Banks as institutions did not yet exist in Russia, and the magnates and moneylenders of Poland had not been integrated into the empire. Maddox had no option but to seek loans from a claque of Ryazan-Moscow merchants, who for centuries had been the sole group in Russia with serious amounts of cash at their disposal. The poet Alexander Pushkin borrowed from the merchants, as did the state, but it was unprecedented for a single individual to be so dependent on credit, as opposed to receiving a grant from the empress, to operate a public institution. Having sunk his personal savings from his magic shows and the Taganka neighborhood Vauxhall into the operation of the Petrovsky, Maddox had no practical intention of paying the loans back. He also knew that the barrel-bellied, bearded boyars would seek his hide if he defaulted. His theater—and his safety—rested on receiving the blessing, as well as the protection, of his other creditors: the powerful noblemen of the governing board. Once he had obtained this protection, Maddox took an audacious step. He appealed to the board for additional financing. Apparently Maddox’s ambition, not to mention his slyness, knew no bounds.

      The confrontation with the merchants was postponed as the financial standing of the existing theater continued to deteriorate. Between 1786 and 1791 the Petrovsky stagnated. Frustrated by the repertoire choices and miserable salaries, some of Maddox’s star performers relocated to St. Petersburg and the Imperial Theaters. Leased serfs and the orphanage provided replacements, including some true talents. Maddox hired Arina Sobakina and Gavrila Raykov, two comic dancers taught by Paradis, as well as the great actor Andrey Ukrasov, purported to be a trendsetter among young Muscovites—but these overexposed, underpaid performers could not, on their own merits, keep the Petrovsky afloat.

      Maddox could not pay interest on his debt, much less pay down the principal, and his efforts in 1786 to solicit even more funding from the Opekunskiy sovet predictably came to naught. He was branded a deadbeat. His merchant lenders renewed their demands for repayment, raising the interest rates and threatening him with prison. He tried to plead his case in St. Petersburg, “going there during the winter for five months and in the end leaving my petition behind without any hope of it being taken up.”⁴⁸ Then, back in Moscow that same year before the governing board, he fell to his knees: “Since I have no means whatsoever to settle my debts, that which is owed to the orphanage and my particular creditors,” he begged, “I find myself for faithful payment with no recourse but to surrender the entire matter to the governing board, and with it to surrender myself, all of my possessions and the income they provide, in free will to the management of the governing board.”⁴⁹

      With that, the theater on Petrovka Street, later known as the Bolshoi, became a government operation. The Opekunskiy sovet assumed complete control over the building and its finances. Maddox retained the title of general director, along with a budget of 27,000 rubles to pay his performers, the doctor, the furnace stoker, and the hairdresser. His salary was pegged to the success of the ballets and operas that he staged—5,000 rubles if receipts from the performances exceeded 50,000 rubles, 3,000 rubles if not. If, as was expected, expenses outweighed receipts, then he would receive nothing, not even firewood and candles for his apartment. To survive, Maddox appealed to the masses, staging more comedies than tragedies. The rich regarded him with suspicion, but he had a common touch. His repertoire choices showed his preference for exuberant childlike characters, mad dreamers rather than representatives of boring convention. Characters like him.

      In the first year of the new arrangement, he earned his 5,000 rubles, relying on the advice of noblemen with an avid interest in the theater when sorting out the season. Some of these noblemen operated private serf theaters and were no less keen to keep tabs on Maddox as he was on them. They approved the good and censored the bad—not just those works that offended etiquette, but also those whose actors failed to emote, or whose dancers botched the bourrée.

      The government too stepped in. Alexander Prozorovsky, an arch-conservative, anti-Enlightenment figure, took a special interest in Maddox and his business dealings. He had been appointed governor general of Moscow in an effort to prevent a repeat, in imperial Russia, of the fall of the Bastille in Paris. The delights of his command of Moscow included book-burning parties, the suppression of occult groups and non-Orthodox religious sects, the Freemasons in particular, and the recruitment of spies to monitor the comings and goings of potential insurrectionists.

      The Petrovsky fell outside of Prozorovsky’s control, which made Maddox a target of special investigation. The governor general sought to prove that Maddox had been negligent in fulfilling the duties granted him by the empress, and to negate the exclusive rights that remained in force despite his financial ruin. Confusion dominates his reports to Catherine, and to the noblemen’s club, as to whether Maddox’s exclusive rights terminated in 1791 or 1796. Maddox of course defended the latter date, but the proof the governor general demanded could not be found, neither in Maddox’s home nor in the files of Mikhaíl Volkonsky, the deceased governor general of Moscow, nor in police records. Maddox claimed that the papers granting him his privilege had mysteriously vanished. When pressed, he argued that the papers had been destroyed in the fire that had occurred back in February of 1780, in the three-sided wooden theater on Znamenka Street. Likewise next to nothing remained of the architectural plan, including the model, of the theater on Petrovka Street. The original architect, Christian Rosberg, informed the chief of police that Maddox had confiscated the model from him, but when the plan and model were demanded СКАЧАТЬ