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

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СКАЧАТЬ the space and mixed an odor akin to singed hair with the smell of the patrons. The light was magnified by mirrors onstage and off; torch dances by masked male and female performers served as rough-and-ready spotlights; handheld candles in the audience were used to read programs. Underground were nooks for the dress- and wigmaker, rooms for making and storing props and panels, and practice spaces for the musicians. Even those who could read music sometimes learned their parts by rote, saving Maddox the cost of a copyist, paper, and ink. Coal stoves heated the theater and the masquerade rotunda.

      The hall was Maddox’s greatest pride and greatest expense. (Most of the loans he obtained from the Opekunskiy sovet went to its construction.) The Englishman Charles Hatchett, an amateur chemist and son of the imperial Russian coach maker, recalled Maddox boasting to him that the masquerade rotunda could hold 5,000 people. Hatchett was either mistaken in his recollection or referring to the number of people who could be accommodated in Moscow’s public gardens, which had entertainments of their own. Or perhaps Maddox was simply exaggerating. In truth, the rotunda could hold 2,000 people, excluding the musicians in the rafters, and the theater itself no more than 900. Hatchett further observed that, no matter the size of the crowd, the well-heeled in the loges could preserve their privacy: “The boxes had veils of light silk to draw before the front so that those in them may be seen or not at their pleasure.”²⁴

      Maddox pampered the elite, his season-pass holders, with coal heat and fashion brochures, and he invited them to rent their loges in advance so that they might “decorate them as they saw fit.”²⁵ The seating plan recalled a chessboard, with the queens and bishops stacked at the back, and the pawns, the single-ticket holders, gathered before them. The participants in the masquerades, in contrast, tended to be “idlers and spendthrifts” looking for fun, and “gentry seeking grooms for their daughters.”²⁶ The decadence and occasional tawdriness of the masquerades added to the allure of Maddox’s theater and inspired a grisly tale of fiction, “Concert of Demons,” whose hero, a former asylum inmate, suffers a psychotic episode in the Petrovsky. Sparks fall from the stars onto the roof of the theater as he wanders past a decrepit lantern-holder into the rotunda, which is illuminated, poorly, by smoking tapers in the chandeliers. The hero peers through the murk and the seductive swirl of red-and-black domino masks to behold, on the orchestra platform, Frankensteinian grotesquerie: “Necks of storks with faces of dogs, bodies of oxen with heads of swallows, cocks with goats’ feet, goats with men’s hands.”²⁷ The powdered, owl-faced conductor leads the band in a respectable performance of the overture to The Magic Flute. The hero is introduced to the ghosts of famous composers. Then he is seized. “In half a minute,” the conductor tears his right leg off, “leaving nothing but bone and dry sinews; the latter he began to stretch out like strings.”²⁸ His remaining leg dances to the music before he loses consciousness.

      The author of the 1834 tale, Mikhaíl Zagoskin, claimed, in tribute to Maddox, that it was based on actual events.

      MADDOX’S INITIAL BUDGET for performers was just under 23,000 rubles, with the cost of operating the theater and the masquerade rotunda, including the salaries paid to the doctor, the coal stoker, and the hairdresser and wigmaker coming to 28,500 rubles. His roster included thirteen actors, seven actresses, and a dozen musicians. There were also seven dancers, three male, four female, who were denied room and board, and who earned pittances: 72 rubles a season in the case of the least-skilled ballerina. His lead actors came from a playhouse that had operated in Moscow in the 1760s under the direction of the composer Nikolay Titov. Nadezhda Kaligraf, widow of Ivan, earned a modest 600 rubles a season for delivering lines such as the following from the German bourgeois tragedy Miss Sara Sampson: “A short disappearance with a lover is a stain, it is true; but still a stain which time effaces. In some time, all will be forgotten, and for a rich heiress there are always men to be found, who are not so scrupulous.”²⁹ She parried onstage with Vasiliy Pomerantsev, a subtle Shakespearean actor much coveted by Maddox’s rivals—those upper nobles who conspired to pry his exclusive rights away from him. Pomerantsev earned a proper 2,000 rubles for up to a hundred performances a year and did not mind his employer insisting that his lines not be cued from the wings or through a hole in the front of the stage.

      The theater opened its doors on the eve of New Year’s Eve, December 30, 1780, with a dramatic prologue that extolled not Catherine the Great, as would have been de rigueur in the Imperial Theaters, but Maddox himself. The deities of the arts, Momus and Thalia, are cast out of Moscow when their theater burns down but return incognito aided by other mythological celebrities. A chorus greets them at the entrance to the theater on Petrovka to proclaim the end of their suffering in a boring, unfree world without art. The prologue pokes at the ulcer of theatrical censorship while also boasting of Maddox’s talents as entertainer. It was written by the satirist Alexander Ablesimov, the librettist of The Miller Who Was Also a Magician, a Swindler, and a Matchmaker, the comic opera that stood as Maddox’s biggest success to date. It was a step up from the witty fables that Ablesimov spent most of his time writing.

      Next on the program was a presumably recycled, quickly stitched-together piece of pantomime and dance called L’école enchantée, or The Magic School. Little is known about it beyond a playbill listing the dramatis personae and the names of the ballet master, costumer, designer, and five lead performers. The masks, silks, panels, and screens are long lost. As was typical of ballets at the time, characters came from myth, and their gestures were perhaps derived from picture books, illustrated tales of the ancient world. The inclusion of the magician Mercurius, god of eloquence and commerce in L’école enchantée, suggests that it was intended as an allegorical illustration of Maddox’s illusion-filled career.

      The music, also lost, came from the quill and inkpot of Josef Starzer, an industrious, well-connected Viennese composer credited with dozens of ballets. His collaborations with the influential ballet master Jean-Georges Noverre enhanced his international reputation, as did the itinerant dancers who spread his music around. Starzer fraternized at the Russian court with the Austrian dancer Leopold Paradis, who performed in St. Petersburg for almost two decades before getting a teaching position in Moscow at the Imperial Foundling Home. There Paradis taught classes of fifteen girls and fifteen boys on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from nine to noon, casting them in “sérieux,” “demi-caractère,” and “grotesque” roles based on their faces, not their feet.³⁰ His agreement with the Foundling Home required him to set a new ballet every other year on his students, while also providing instruction in traditional partnered social dances: Polish minuets and contra dances. Those students with natural talent and true zeal were given extra training. The curriculum lasted three years, with an exam after the first year deciding whether students had sufficient suppleness to proceed. Those who flunked were immediately replaced, since Paradis built his entire pedagogical method on classes of thirty.

      Paradis was paid 2,000 rubles a year by the orphanage and given a housing, firewood, and candle allowance of another 200 rubles (he had requested 300). He was old-fashioned enough for the orphanage to want him dismissed, but its overseer in St. Petersburg was unwilling to compensate him for the termination of his contract and approve the appointment of a new teacher, so he was kept on the payroll. Meantime, Paradis was involved in a dispute with a former employer in St. Petersburg over wages owed. No one was happy, and complaints flew back and forth on luxury paper bearing florid signatures.

      Sixteen of the children in Paradis’s class danced in L’école enchantée. Their names are not included on the surviving playbill. The names of the adult dancers, the principals, are given, but they must have been traveling performers, since they are nowhere to be found on other Petrovsky Theater programs.

      It hardly mattered, since ballet at the Petrovsky Theater was of much less importance to Maddox than opera and drama. It was also derivative, replicating Italian and French practices, and posing no threat to the bigger-budget ballets staged at court in St. Petersburg. The pantomimes Maddox produced had resonant names like The Fountain of Good and Bad Fortune, but gauging what exactly occurred onstage is hopeless. There exists СКАЧАТЬ