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

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СКАЧАТЬ chamberlain. The residence of the court chamberlain, an elegant structure of yellow pastel that still stands on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, housed first the college and then, after 1865, the business office, or kontora, of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. Toward the end of the century, a larger space was found in a building on Neglinnaya Street that had once been a canton school, an institution that readied the sons of conscripts for military service with lessons in everything from fortification to penmanship to shoemaking.

      When the Imperial Theater College first opened, in 1806, it enrolled fifteen girls and fifteen boys. Far fewer students completed the course of studies in the first years than began it, because many chose to pursue other vocations. Tuberculosis also took its toll, as did personal problems. When the college could not fill the rosters of ballet performances, itinerant performers from the provinces and serf actors from Moscow’s manor houses stepped in. The reputation of the art improved, as did the training, and by 1817, the number of students had doubled. Five years later, eighty-six students were in attendance: forty-one girls and thirty-four boys in the dance program, three concentrating in drama, and eight in music. By the end of the 1820s, when the college moved to the manor house on Bolshaya Dmitrovka Street, enrollment exceeded two hundred.

      Students entered the college between ages nine and twelve and graduated between eighteen and twenty. Those living in residence included orphaned wards of the state and children of people working for the Imperial Theaters. The college limited the number of boarders to fifty students of each gender; by an odd quirk, those living at home could train in dance but not drama or music. The curriculum for the beginning students included, besides dance, classes in holy law, Russian grammar, arithmetic, handwriting, geography, history, drawing, gymnastics, piano, and violin. Later, mythology, fencing, and mime were added. Once it was codified, the routine in the college was invariant: rise at eight, common prayer, breakfast, dance classes until noon or one, lunch, academic subjects, dinner, carriage to the theater for those performing, permission to visit home on major holidays. Dance rehearsals were often held off site; on Saturdays, the classes were inspected. Those students who did not, in the end, exhibit talent were given training in costume- and prop-making and the science of set changes. Those with some promise were assigned to theaters in Moscow and St. Petersburg as needed, with an obligation to perform for ten years.

      Tales of life in the college are scarce but suggest a no-frills yet nurturing environment. One early graduate described being dressed “disgracefully, ridiculously, in trousers and coats of putrid light green fabric, patched here and there.”² But the college was not Bleak House. Mikhaíl Shchepkin (1788–1841), a serf actor destined for greatness, taught at the college in the decades after Napoleon. He described his hard work there in a kindly cant: “Having taken on these responsibilities and accustomed myself to performing them conscientiously I seldom missed a day at the school. I soon became acquainted with all of the children, and we lived as friends, studying a little, but seriously.”³

      The next concern was rebuilding the theater itself. For the first two years after the fire, Moscow’s entertainers performed on estates and in summer gardens around the city. Theatrical life once more ended up in the homes of noblemen, many of whom maintained private serf theaters within their sprawling compounds. The largest exploited the talents of hundreds of performers, and hosted operas, ballets, and divertissements of foreign (Italian) visual design. With the Petrovsky gone, public theater suffered, and many of the professionals that Maddox had employed lived hand-to-mouth. Only in the spring of 1808 did the actors and dancers of Moscow find a new home in a wooden theater on Arbat Square, designed on imperial commission by Carlo Rossi, the immigrant son of a ballerina.

      Its completion had been slow. Ivan Valberg (Val’berkh), the first famous native Russian ballet master, was told that it would be finished at the start of 1808, but work didn’t even begin until almost Easter. As he grumbled to his wife, “The theater is not done and the pettiness of the intrigues endless. There are no costumes, no sets; the conditions, in a word, are those of a fairground booth.” Valberg found the “squabbling between the sub-directors, actors, dancers, dressmakers, and assorted riff-raff” tiresome and came to regret coming to Moscow from St. Petersburg, where he had held a comfortable position at court.⁴

      Most of what is known about the Imperial Arbat Theater is filtered through fictional novels and stories. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace includes a scene in which seventeen-year-old heroine Natasha Rostova, having just been humiliated by her fiancé’s father and sister, goes to the opera; she is joined by the socially ambitious and sexually alluring Hélène. At first the fakery of the opera seems all too apparent and fails to impress. But Natasha, needing to lose herself in fantasy, falls under its spell. “She did not remember who she was or where she was or what was happening before her. She looked and thought, and the strangest thoughts flashed through her head unexpectedly, without connection. Now the thought came to her of jumping up to the footlights and singing the aria the actress was singing, then she wanted to touch a little old man who was sitting not far away with her fan, then to lean over to Hélène and tickle her.”⁵ The opera itself goes unnamed but is generally assumed to be an anachronistic combination of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable and Gounod’s Faust.

      The references to ballet in War and Peace are also indistinct (Tolstoy disapproved of twirling naked legs as much as he did stout prima-donna singers). Natasha refers to the dancer and ballet master Louis Duport, who performed in St. Petersburg and Moscow between 1808 and 1812, adhering, with majestic bearing, to the strictures of the French classical style. In the novel, Duport symbolizes the French influence on Russian aristocratic life, soon to be shattered by the Napoleonic Wars. It was an accurate depiction of the historical reality: War destroyed the Imperial Arbat Theater, razing it four years after it opened. The last event, on August 30, 1812, was a masquerade ball augmented by a mazurka quadrille performed by students.

      War would also transform Valberg’s career. “When Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée marched into Russia,” he “became the choreographer of the hour.”⁶ Valberg’s transformation can be traced through his portraits. One likeness presents him as a curious man of letters: hair tousled, eyebrow cocked, a hint of St. Petersburg’s spires in the background. Another has him looking remote and austere, with bleached skin, pale eyes, and a thin wig pulling back his scalp. The latter is the appearance he cultivated in Moscow as a mature artist, a Russian cultural patriot.

      Valberg had begun his career in St. Petersburg, teaching in the theater school there from 1794 to 1801. For a brief period within that span, by capricious decree of Tsar Paul I, men could teach ballets but were not allowed to perform in them. Shoelaces and social dances were likewise banned. The tsar loved rigid drill and martinet discipline and believed that dancers, female dancers, should be more like soldiers—that is, less delicate and more violent in their movements. Ironically, he met his end at the hands of violent soldiers. A cabal of drunken officers confronted him in his residence, pulling him out from behind a curtain and demanding his abdication. When he refused, he was strangled. Few tears were shed in the Imperial Theaters after Paul’s assassination. Men returned to the ballet, and the waltz returned to the court.

      In 1801, following the ascension of Tsar Alexander I, Valberg traveled to Paris to improve his technique. Charles-Louis Didelot replaced him as pedagogue, raising standards in the corps de ballet and working to make Russian-born talent into “stars.”⁷ Didelot’s officially sanctioned reforms included creating a middle tier of character dancers, or coryphées, between the corps de ballet and the first dancers. He eliminated the “steeplechasers” from the roster of the imperial ballet and replaced them with performers who possessed supple limbs and expressive faces.⁸ Ballet historian Yuriy Bakhrushin credited Didelot with putting dancers in flexible, heelless slippers and sandals suggesting “Ancient Greece.”⁹ Out went the buckle shoes of the past, along with the wigs and rigid frocks that had limited the dancers’ movements. Didelot established a strict training regimen and was known as a zealous taskmaster, albeit one with a kind heart and a gentle touch. Both men and women were taught entrechats and battements, and proper posture СКАЧАТЬ