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

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СКАЧАТЬ the ranks had pulled a muscle or sprained an ankle), minor or major accidents (the broken ribs suffered by a musician who fell asleep on the sill of an open window), and the status of repairs to the theater. When praised for their work or asked about their personal affairs, Vasiltsovsky and Verstovsky swooned, grateful for the attention from on high. Gedeonov had a short wick and wore a scowl, but he cared about his employees, guaranteeing salaries for performers in the first and second ranks and granting special privileges after two decades of service. Housing was a never-ending concern, both for the artists and the staff as well as for their families. Gedeonov’s kindness was felt by the eldest daughter of Verstovsky’s clerk; she had been living across from a “filthy kitchen and yard in a room next to laundrywomen” and an actor who “dried and ironed his black underwear” in plain sight. (According to her father’s appeal to Gedeonov, the poor girl also had to endure the “perverse company” of middle-of-the-night card players and horn blowers.) Verstovsky rescued her from the squalor. For such consideration, Gedeonov earned the love and affection of his employees, who praised him, with “sincere souls and contrite hearts,” as “a Father and Benefactor of the human race.”³⁶

      Gedeonov had angled for control of the Bolshoi, and though he managed it with care he was also a micromanager, personally involved in ticketing (in general he refused to provide comps to Bolshoi Theater performances, even to high-ranking nobles) and matters as seemingly trivial as the cost of the bouquets tossed at dancers and singers during benefits. He even pursued the case of a malfeasant who, in November of 1845, tossed an apple at the stage during a benefit performance. He took pains to return a beloved pipe that a German count had left in a loge and haggled over the prices for a hurdy-gurdy and carpets imported from Scotland. In addition to setting the salaries of the artists in the Imperial Theaters, he facilitated the granting of vacations and medical leaves.

      Once he had been promoted to director, Verstovsky endeavored to prove that he was up to the task of keeping Moscow’s larger and smaller stages running by regaling Gedeonov with up-to-the-minute descriptions of Bolshoi and Malïy Theater operations, placing much greater emphasis on ballet and opera productions than concerts—though he made special mention of Franz Liszt, a composer and pianist he deeply admired and whose recitals in Moscow proved lucrative. Verstovsky inserted himself into all of the operations of the Bolshoi Theater orchestra, insisting on auditions and precise tuning, making sure that bows were repaired and rosin stocked. The music sounded wonderful, as Gedeonov admitted in his otherwise damning assessment of the condition of the Bolshoi Theater in April of 1842. Verstovsky had an obvious personal interest in keeping his own works on the stage and shamelessly promoted Askold’s Tomb, which stayed in the Bolshoi repertoire exactly as long as he remained employed by the Moscow Imperial Theaters. His position enabled him to postpone or problematize the Moscow premieres of works by his rivals, including Glinka.

      Verstovsky also took a personal interest in improving the education provided by the Imperial Theater College, complaining in 1841 that “the voice teacher, M. Gerkulani, has yet to have them open their mouths in his classes and teaches solfeggio on the keyboard, which is quite curious. And even more amusing, the dance teacher in the school, M. Peysar, has lame hands. Sitting, he demonstrates what he wants his students to do with just his feet.”³⁷ In truth, the situation was never as bad as he described, and the problems he identified improved after the restructuring. Energetic young teachers were appointed to the staff, ensuring that instruction lived up to the needs of the college and the theaters it supported.

      Verstovsky cultivated the image of a hearty good fellow for his superiors, but not for the artists under his supervision, who found him standoffish. The long-time Bolshoi Theater decorator and technician Karl Valts remembered him

      inevitably being on the stage before performances, standing before the curtain, and everyone having to come up to him to bow. He never wore the mandatory uniform at the time, but was always dressed in a short jacket and dark grey pants. He was almost bald, but a few unruly hairs remained stuck to his crown, like Bismarck. In conversation with the artists he always kept his hands in his pockets and addressed them in the familiar form. Beside him, like a shadow, arose the figure of the inspector of the Theater College.³⁸

      Although he generally treated the artists of the theater with cold derision, Verstovsky fell head over heels for one of them: the beautiful, talented, and overextended singer Nadezhda Repina. She was lowborn, the daughter of a serf musician, but had a proud prima donna career on the stage of the Malïy Theater and inspired some of Verstovsky’s songs, including the most eloquent of his Russian Romances. He married her.

      Given the customs of the time, however, it was not an easy marriage to maintain. Rumor had it that, for political reasons, Repina was forced to retire in 1841. Verstovsky signed the resignation papers behind her back just before control of the Moscow Imperial Theaters reverted to Gedeonov. Repina’s feelings on the matter are unknown, but it was said that she returned home from a triumphant performance to learn from her husband that her career was over. She fainted and took to drink.

      Verstovsky must also have been distraught at what he had been forced to do. He adored his wife and would not be parted from her, just as he would not be parted from his true self—that of an artist, a composer, not a bureaucrat. Out of frustration with his lot, his paperwork, and the intrigue that he himself had promoted, he would one day wish the Bolshoi away.

      But the Bolshoi was now more than a building. It stood as the symbol of a pursuit: the struggle for national identity through cultural identity. Because Moscow had borne the brunt of Napoleon, because it had burned and been rebuilt, because its populace had endured and finally triumphed, the formerly brackish backwater claimed the mantle of national purpose from the imperial capital of St. Petersburg. Bureaucratic wrangling between Moscow and St. Petersburg aside, Moscow found itself ascendant. Its distance—from St. Petersburg, from Europe—proved a benefit rather than a hindrance. Even before it became the seat of power in the twentieth century, Moscow in the nineteenth, after Napoleon, began to assume importance. The Kremlin, and the Bolshoi, could bide their time on the bend of the river along trading routes that the government could only pretend to govern.

      The struggle to represent Russia in the arts continued through the imperial Russian era, through the Soviet era, and into the present day; surely, it is a struggle without end, Romantic in the extreme for its investment in ideals of the people and the nation. Yet the Bolshoi could lay claim to that most clichéd of concepts: the Russian soul.

       . 3 .

       FLEET AS LIGHTNING: THE CAREER OF EKATERINA SANKOVSKAYA

      ALEXEI VERSTOVSKY LEFT behind a long paper trail as first the inspector and then director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. The performers under his control did not. Neither did their performances. What survives from the first half of the nineteenth century are music scores, scenarios, the recollections of eyewitnesses, and the images collected, over time, by devotees such as Vasiliy Fyodorov, an art historian and director of the Malïy Theater Museum under Stalin. But even these collections are selective affairs, labors of love with huge chronological gaps that no scouring of archives, kiosks, and libraries could fill. The first half of the nineteenth century, the era of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater, is even less well represented than the Maddox era—but for the case of the Moscow-born dancer Ekaterina Aleksandrovna Sankovskaya (1816–1878), whose career extended from October 1836 to November 1854. A diva before the phenomenon of the diva existed, Sankovskaya rivaled her illustrious European contemporaries Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler in both lightness and precision.

      Yet her name, unlike theirs, has СКАЧАТЬ