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

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СКАЧАТЬ in 1819, but no specific plans were drawn up until the summer of 1820, when four members of the Imperial Academy of the Arts put their heads together. The lead planner was Andrey Mikhaílov, a senior professor of architecture, with three other members of the academy, including his brother, also participating. The first draft was subject to revision, and the budget went beyond what Golitsïn was prepared to approve on behalf of the court. The extravagant plan needed to be scaled back. Throughout his career, Mikhaílov, who also designed the hospital where Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in 1821, saw numerous building projects either canceled or completed by others, the Bolshoi included. The court indulged him with commissions but recognized his limitations.

      Another architect involved from the start, Osip (Joseph) Bové, modified the design with the approval both of Golitsïn and the tsar. Bové had long enjoyed official support and oversaw the post-Napoleonic reconstruction of Red Square and the restoration of façades throughout Moscow. He could not, however, control the imaginations of the private builders contracted for the restoration work, the result being a riot of reds and greens that displeased the tsar, who ordered the façades swathed in paler colors. (These pale colors characterize the older buildings in Moscow to the present day.) For the Bolshoi Theater, Bové exercised restraint, eliminating, for reasons of taste, the nineteenth-century version of a shopping center that Mikhaílov had envisioned for the first floor and lowering the flat roof. He did everything he could to control costs, including contracting the masons himself and transporting stone bases to the site on his own dray. It was also his idea to salvage whatever he could from the detritus of the old Maddox theater; not all traces of the past were expunged. But as the wiser men of the Imperial Theaters directorate had predicted, costs still ran well over budget, from the 960,000 rubles allotted by the treasury to the colossal sum of 2 million.

      Construction of the theater lasted more than four years. In July of 1820, the first of the ditches was dug and the first of the thousands of pine logs forming the foundation hammered into place in the bog on Petrovka Street. (Estimates vary on the number of logs pounded into the mire: more than 2,100 for certain, more than 4,000 perhaps.) Construction involved hundreds of laborers in the winters, even more in the summers. It did not end until December of 1824, and then just barely. The zodiac-embossed curtain and scrims were completed after the extended 1824 deadline, and, because of the budget overrun, both Mikhaílov and Bové had to sacrifice the 8,000 rubles in imported chandeliers that they had intended to hang in the side rooms, replacing them with illuminations of papier-mâché and tin fashioned by local craftspeople. Bové also had to forego the giant mirror that he had wanted to hang in front of the curtain, allowing audience members to gaze at themselves; the mere thought of it terrified the directorate, as much for its radicalism as its cost.

      The finished building was nonetheless luxurious, with the loges facing the stage drenched in crimson velvet, gold fringe, and braids, and the open boxes on each side suspended, as if from the air, from cast-iron brackets. Columns on pedestals framed the galleries, supporting the arabesque-decorated ceiling, from which a massive crystal chandelier was raised and lowered by pulley. Oil lamps provided lighting, along with two parallel rows of candles fronting the loges. Even Russophobe Europeans were impressed at what had been achieved. “Travelers who visit Russia expecting to find a people just emerging from barbarism are often astonished to find themselves in scenes of Parisian elegance and refinement,” the Illustrated London News opined. The new theater was the greatest example of this unexpected urbanity. Although the theater was slow to adapt to new technologies—gas lighting was not installed until 1836, in tandem with the building of a special gas plant—the “orchestra and chorus were strong,” making the theater “a favorite place of resort of the Russian nobility, who usually wear their stars and ribbons at the opera.”²¹

      It could hold more than 2,200 people, but demand exceeded capacity, especially in the first years, prompting management to repeat programs and cram additional seats into the auditorium. The side rooms had enough space to host chamber concerts by touring foreign musicians. The entrance was graced with a portico and led to a grand central staircase and ample reception rooms. Five massive semicircular windows provided light for the auditorium and the stage on each side of the theater. Ten paired columns supported the gable at the back. Since it was bigger than Maddox’s operation, it was called the Bolshoi—meaning “Grand”—Petrovsky Theater. Over time, the reference to Petrovka Street was dropped. The space in front, Theater Square, acquired a public garden. Later a fountain was added. The ravine and pond that had once been on the site were filled with rock and soil hauled from demolished bastions in Kitay-gorod. Theater Square also came to include a smaller theater for plays, the Malïy, also designed by Bové.

      Both the inside and outside of the theater inspired, and were inspired by, national pride. An unsigned article in Moskovskiye vedomosti heaps praise on the theater and on Moscow, the rebuilt symbol of “the sword of victory,” ready to join the ranks of the great world cities.²²

      The swiftness and grandeur of certain recent events in Russia have astonished our contemporaries and will be perceived as nothing less than miracles in distant posterity … Our fatherland draws closer to the great European powers with each achievement. Such a thought arises within the soul of the patriot at the appearance of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater, whose walls have risen, like a phoenix, in new splendor and magnificence from the ruins. For how long in this place has the eye been exposed to the foul heaps, the remains of horrendous disaster, and the ear to the thumping of the worker’s hammer? And now to capture the delighted gaze is a splendid building, an edifice of enchanting taste in height, immensity, and noble simplicity, coupled with elegance, stateliness, and ease. And now the inner walls receive the thunder of the muses; positive inspiration for humanity! Such is the magnitude, in spirit and deed, of Russia’s government.

      Unlike Maddox’s catch-as-catch-can song-and-dance operation, the grand space was conceived from the start as a cathedral to the finest of the fine arts, one that placed the mercantile middle classes and the inhabitants of the Table of Ranks side by side “on the path to Enlightenment.”

      The nineteen-year-old poet Mikhaíl Lermontov celebrated the construction of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater in similarly lavish terms. In his “Panorama Moskvï” (Panorama of Moscow), a meditation on the walls, roofs, and boulevards of the city, he imagined the god Apollo, whose alabaster statue topped the portico of the Bolshoi, glaring at the crenelated Kremlin walls from his chariot, upset that “Russia’s ancient and sacred monuments” were hidden from view.²³ Those monuments had been seriously damaged in 1812, after Napoleon ordered the Kremlin detonated and soldiers looted the decorative insignia and ornaments. Tsar Alexander I commissioned the repairs in a neo-Gothic style, and his successor, Tsar Nicholas I, saw them through. The Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater, in contrast, struck a neoclassical pose: symmetrical, monumental, and harmonious.

      The theater opened on January 6, 1825, with a benediction and an allegorical prologue featuring Apollo and his muses. Then “a soothsayer from a mythological world” predicted the nation’s future, the triumphs to come. There was also an affirmation of the vastness of the Russian Empire, the terrain it occupied from Poland to the Caspian Sea, from “the mists of Finland” to the “cloud ridges” of the “formidable Caucasus.” Bové, the hero of the moment (Mikhaílov was all but forgotten), heard well-earned bravos from the stage. Following the six p.m. opening performance, at eleven p.m. the theater hosted its first masquerade. It was meant to be an elegant occasion; patrons were told not to bring hats or “indecent masks” into the theater.²⁴

      The opening of the theater brought the peregrinations, if not the hardscrabble existence, of Moscow’s performers to an end. There remained the challenge of learning multiple roles for multiple short-lived stagings. Some were made in Russia, others freely imported, in the absence of copyright protection, from Europe. The first years featured burlesque comedies and benefits for individual dancers and singers, but Pushkin also made his presence felt (as source for the ballets Ruslan and Lyudmila, Prisoner of the Caucasus, and The Black Shawl), likewise Cervantes (Don Quixote) and Goethe (Faust). Preternatural fare put the fabulous СКАЧАТЬ