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

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СКАЧАТЬ of Catherine the Great’s reign and the first years of her daughter-in-law’s rise to power as spouse of Tsar Paul I. Receiving word of the strife, the empress consort, Mariya, dispatched one of her spies to report on the Petrovsky.⁶⁰ The spy, Nikolay Maslov, wrote back three weeks later, on November 28, 1799, with a long list of calamities. He complained that the theater changed its shows so unpredictably that actors could not learn their lines in time. Their costumes were often ill kempt, or sometimes even performers simply wore street clothes. Plus the theater and dressing rooms were so frightfully cold that the performers often fell ill. “The management, all the while,” he continued, “rebukes them harshly.”⁶¹

      Mariya expressed genuine surprise that the mistreated actors had not taken matters into their own hands and staged a hostile takeover of the theater. The Petrovsky had been bankrupt for at least three years, she realized. It had died along with her mother-in-law, Catherine the Great. Although Maddox announced business as usual in Moskovskiye vedomosti at the end of the official period of mourning for the empress, not even fireworks in the great rotunda could suppress the sad truth. He had nothing in the coffers, no one to clean the stage or bait the mousetraps, no coal to stoke or wood to burn. Still harboring the delusion that he might placate his nemesis, Prozorovsky, he had pledged to repair the theater and offered to heat it in advance of performances, rather than letting the rabble shiver in their stalls. He had also sought to increase receipts with a production of Pygmalion, an Ovid-derived melodrama about a sculptor who, having renounced the pleasures of the flesh, falls in love with one of his own creations. (The goddess Venus takes pity on him and brings the statue to life.) Maddox’s 1794 and 1796 performances of the drama, to sweet music by the Bohemian violinist Georg Benda, succeeded, but most of his other stagings of the period failed. The entire theatrical enterprise had fallen to pieces, and no one from the Moscow aristocratic establishment wanted to clean up the mess. Maddox sent a long letter to Mariya in 1802 in hopes that the orphanage would assume his debts and he would be allowed to retire from twenty-six years of service to Russian culture with his dignity intact. Following an audit that found both the theater and the orphanage awash in red ink, Mariya ordered the liquidation of Maddox’s estate.

      The debts to the Opekunskiy sovet exceeded 300,000 rubles, which Tsar Paul, Mariya’s husband, absorbed on behalf of the crown. The Ryazan-Moscow boyars, for all their colorful invective, did not get their 90,000 rubles back.

      The Petrovsky Theater closed, in ghastly fashion, on Sunday, October 8, 1805. At three o’clock, just before a performance of the popular mermaid spectacle Lesta, or the Dnepr Water Nymph, a spark became a flame, which became an inferno. The theater burned for the next three hours, a conflagration seen far and wide. The curious gawked; police, theater workers, and firemen milled helplessly around. The cause of the blaze was a subject of speculation. Two eyewitnesses, gentle people in their dotage, proposed that the Day of Judgment had at long last arrived for Maddox and his scandalsinged theater. Lesta was a benign thing, a comic opera that retold an old legend of a mermaid who pines for a prince, but the ladies in question thought it was demonic, a horror of the imagination that offended the Christians in the audience. God intervened before the curtain went up.

      Most simply blamed the fire on carelessness in the cloakroom. Someone had knocked over a candle, setting the lining of a coat alight; his or her frantic efforts to stamp out the flames had failed. Such would have been typical of Maddox’s underpaid employees, the nobleman playwright Stepan Zhikharev explained, “the whole lot, each one being thicker-headed than the next.”⁶² Zhikharev watched from a distance: “We saw the enormous glow of a fire over Moscow and stood for a long time in bewilderment, wondering what could be burning so intensely. A postman coming from Moscow explained that the theater on Petrovka was on fire and that the fire brigade in all of its strength was unable to defend it.”⁶³

      Maddox was done. He stayed in Moscow for a time, trolling the streets outside of his home in his familiar crimson cloak. There was talk of eviction, but the empress consort intervened to let him keep his house, instead of giving it to his actors. Eventually, he retired to the dacha and garden that he had bought years before, at the height of his powers, in the village of Popovka. He died there on September 27, 1822, at age seventy-five. His dancers and singers had become wards of the state and the Moscow division of the Imperial Theaters. Besides the remnants of Maddox’s troupe, the Imperial Theaters absorbed a serf theater with a staff of seventy-four as well as the French public theater operating in the city at the time. Maddox’s native Russian actors elegantly assured the empress consort that their pursuit of fame was not affected by “self-investment” but a desire to bring Russian theater to its “highest perfection.”⁶⁴ Even in its ruin, the forerunner of the Bolshoi staked its claim as a source of national pride. The ambitions—and the failures—of Maddox’s theater would also haunt the Bolshoi, which would likewise endure corrosive conflicts between the coldhearted management and the disloyal performers, succumb to government oversight, adjust the repertoire in search of audiences, struggle with stagecraft, and squander huge sums. And the theater would burn, repeatedly, but always be rebuilt.

      Maddox retired without a title in the Table of Ranks, but with a generous pension of 3,000 rubles and “six horses to his carriage.”⁶⁵ Maddox and his wife, a woman of German aristocratic lineage, had, among their eleven children, a son with a stutter whom they turned out for bad behavior. The stutterer in question, Roman Maddox, became the greatest Russian adventurer of the nineteenth century. He spent a third of his life in prison or exile for swindling, assembled a militia of mountaineers against Napoleon’s troops, and, it was said, ravished more maidens than Casanova. Banished to Siberia, he conducted geological expeditions. The son’s exploits fueled anti-Semitic gossip about the father. The slander increased after his death. Without pretense to subtlety, one Soviet-era source claims that Maddox’s posthumous reputation ranges from a “prominent Englishman who was forced for political reasons to abandon his homeland” to a “thieving speculator and money-grubbing ‘Yid.’”⁶⁶

      In the end, Maddox was no less an illusion than those he created.

       . 2 .

       NAPOLEON AND AFTER

      THE CHARRED REMAINS of the Petrovsky Theater moldered in the bog under its former foundation, home again on summer nights to “birds of prey,” “lots of frogs,” and their music.¹ Maddox’s free-enterprise experiment in dance and song had failed; the tsar stepped in, and ballet and opera in Moscow became, with the exception of the serf theaters, a government operation. The Moscow Imperial Theaters administration was established under the control of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters and the aegis of the court, which oversaw artistic, educational, and financial matters.

      The children were the first order of business. Their training in dance and music had taken place in the Foundling Home before being absorbed into Maddox’s operation. The orphanage remained proudly perched on a bend in the Moscow River, but it no longer privileged training in the arts. The Enlightenment educational principles of Catherine the Great and her personal assistant Ivan Betskoy were pursued instead in a separate building. Its name, the Moscow Imperial Theater College, was cumbersome, but it stuck. Throughout the nineteenth century the college expanded, its curriculum encompassing not only the arts but also the sciences, and enrollment increased. In the twentieth century, the prestigious dance division was renamed the Bolshoi Ballet Academy.

      In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Moscow Imperial Theater College moved around as it grew: from a building in the market district near the old Maddox theater, to a series of stone manor houses. Three of the manor houses belonged to generals СКАЧАТЬ