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

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СКАЧАТЬ a balletic version of Cinderella, the beloved seventeenth-century folktale about an abused and overworked maidservant who becomes, via a magical helper and friendly critters, the sparkling bride of a prince. It was choreographed for the 1825 opening of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater by the twenty-year-old ballerina Félicité Hullen to existing music by her middle-aged husband, Fernando Sor. She was Parisian and he was from Barcelona, but they both ended up in Moscow in the employment of the Imperial Theaters. Their marriage did not last.

      Sor’s career in Moscow spanned three years. He composed other ballet scores, but is best known for his guitar pieces: studies, sets of themes and variations, transcriptions of songs, and sonatas. The music is discreet, polite, and much indebted to Mozart. Hullen was brasher, flashier. She was mentored in Moscow by Glushkovsky, who promoted her talents as a ballerina and then made her his partner as ballet master at the Bolshoi and pedagogue at the Imperial Theater College. She became Russia’s first female choreographer, and included Russian dances in ballets on Russian themes. Like Glushkovsky, Hullen distinguished herself in Moscow by producing comic works on peasant themes that would never have been staged in St. Petersburg, for reasons as much aesthetic as political. Yet Hullen still privileged the repertoire that she had performed as a young dancer in Paris, fueling the criticism from one of the administrators of the Imperial Theaters that she was pushing Russian ballet back in time when it needed to move forward. She serviced her debt to her homeland by introducing features of French Romanticism to Russian ballet. The amalgam she created—of the local and international, from the land, of the ether—helped distinguish ballet in Moscow as something different, something distinct from what was staged in St. Petersburg and throughout Europe.

      Hullen’s and Sor’s Cinderella, which was premiered at the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater during its inaugural season, exemplifies her particular mix of European and Russian influences as well as the distinctive qualities of ballet as revived in Moscow. The familiar European story is clothed in distinctly Russian garb to off er much more than a lesson in protracted courtship or even a tale of personal transformation, whether on the surface, through the heroine’s donning a ball gown and glass slippers, or, more deeply, as she learns to distinguish good from evil. Instead, audiences in Moscow (no strangers to cinders) were accustomed to patriotic sentiments being tucked into ballets and operas, so could interpret Cinderella, at least in part, as a parable of national striving. No longer revealing a girl’s poetic isolation, the ballet now featured Mother Russia as the heroine unwilling to be a maidservant to Europe. Her years of neglect and disrespect had come to an end through the expulsion of Napoleon. The heroes of the war, including the governor general of Moscow, Golitsïn, vie for the role of the prince, and the ball is set in the Russian imperial court. The big new theater also infused the modest folktale with potent grandeur.

      The ballets by Valberg, Glushkovsky, and Hullen mark the emergence of a Russianness that would define the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater for the twenty-eight years of its existence—and not only in ballet. The Bolshoi was (and is) also an opera house, and this same search for Russianness is found in the operas of Mikhaíl Glinka, who was immortalized even before his death as the father figure of the Russian musical tradition. Whereas the choreographers at the Bolshoi made their dances seem Russian by manipulating models from France and Italy, Glinka and his successors relied on exoticisms taken, more often than not, from points to the east. Archaic scales and scale segments came to define Russianness in Russian music, along with invented scales like the whole-tone and the octatonic, church bells, drawn-out lamentations, and, in opera, text settings sensitive to the accents and stresses of the Russian language. Most of these musical novelties were invented, including the tunes supposedly borrowed from the peasants. But by concocting them they became more affecting and alluring, more seductive both to audiences at home and abroad.

      Glinka came from a village near Smolensk, but he was cosmopolitan in mind-set, spending as much time outside of Russia as inside. He learned music in Europe and died in Berlin. His first opera, the pro-Russian, anti-Polish A Life for the Tsar (Zhizn’ za tsarya, 1836) was nonetheless feted as a model nationalist score. (In the Soviet period in particular, it received the blessing of nationalist ideologues, though not before the libretto had been rewritten, to exclude the tsar.) Glinka’s second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842), did not fare as well. Its eclecticism ensured it a difficult journey to the stage. Later, however, the concoction was heard with different ears and esteemed for its earthiness. The score blended European styles and genres. It also paid homage to the ancient bardic epic narrative tradition, and thus seemed to reach back to a Russia of yore: Russia before Peter the Great, Russia before Ivan the Terrible—in other words, Russia before Russia.

      Real or imagined, the success of Glinka’s Russianness was the bane of the existence of his less skilled, less well-trained peers. Among the more resentful of them was Alexei Verstovsky, a prolific composer as well as a central figure in the operations of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater. He composed music for the theater, but his legacy rests on his administrative contributions. His career overlaps with Glinka’s and picks up where Glushkovsky’s leaves off.

      VERSTOVSKY (1799–1862) WAS of modest noble lineage and grew up listening to the subpar serf orchestra on his father’s land in southeast Russia. He trained as an engineer in St. Petersburg but cared much more about his chief hobby: music. He studied singing, took violin lessons, and realized accompaniments at the keyboard. Engineering bored him, so he decided to offend his father by becoming a part-time composer, an occupation that even he thought beneath his station. Verstovsky’s first substantial composition, a vaudeville called Grandma’s Parrots (Babushkinï popugai, 1819), set a low aesthetic bar. His technique improved thanks to lessons with, among others, the great Italian opera composer Gioachino Rossini. (Legend has it that Rossini gave these lessons to Verstovsky only after Verstovsky agreed to settle his gambling debts.) Patrons of the Bolshoi Theater flocked to see Verstovsky’s Slavonic devil opera, Pan Twardowski, but it was ridiculed by operagoers in St. Petersburg for its vacuousness and two-dimensional characterizations. It also paraphrased the scariest pages in Carl Maria von Weber’s German devil opera, Der Freischütz.

      Verstovsky found greater success with a clever blend of love songs, horror effects, and comic minstrel tunes entitled Askold’s Tomb (Askol’dova mogila, 1835). Set in the ancient days of Kievan Rus, the opera involves two lovers, a witch, and an unnamed character seen lurking, in the first act, around the grave of a pagan prince. Dark forces keep the lovers apart, but the witch ensures the rescue of the heroine and her reunion with the hero through some well-timed spells cast around a cauldron, with black cat and owl looking on. The unnamed character helps as well, but ends up drowning in the River Dnieper. Askold’s Tomb played to nationalist sentiments both on the level of Russian medieval plot and archaic musical elocution, and it received hundreds of performances in Moscow and St. Petersburg, becoming arguably the most popular Russian opera of the nineteenth century. Even after it was dropped from the repertoire, the dances survived (Verstovsky joked about the dancers taking them to their graves). Had Glinka not come along with his canonic Russian operas, Verstovsky might be regarded as a central figure in Russian music history. He ended up in the margins.

      His failure to top the success of Askold’s Tomb left him bitter, especially after the ascent of Glinka. Jealous, he grumbled that Glinka’s 1836 opera, A Life for the Tsar, failed as a piece of drama: “One does not go to the theater for the purpose of praying to God,” he declared in the middle of his hotheaded critique.²⁵ Verstovsky thought of himself as the greater pioneer, but was stymied in his pursuit of fame, and thus laid down his pen, becoming a bureaucrat and politician. Positioning himself in the right place at the right time, Verstovsky toadied up to people in power so as to move up the bureaucratic ladder of the Moscow Imperial Theaters from music inspector to cast and crew inspector and then to repertoire inspector. Eventually he took over the Moscow directorate altogether.

      The image that emerges from his employment records is that of a poor gentleman who constructed an administrative career for himself from scratch with no great successes or failures. Despite never loving his work, he was unable to devote himself to leisure for financial and social СКАЧАТЬ