Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  FILIN COMPLETED HIS contract but remains at the theater in charge of an atelier for up-and-coming choreographers. After months of conjecture, Makhar Vaziev was appointed the new artistic director of the ballet. Vaziev comes from Milan by way of St. Petersburg, and his hiring, as Ismene Brown summarizes, “satisfies both the Bolshoi conservatives’ need for a director with a credibly conventional profile and suitable leadership CV to command the dancers’ compliance, and the pressure for an acceptable conductor of renovation and refreshment.”17

  The healing of the present divide permits reflection on the ruptures and sutures of the past. The story of the Bolshoi Theater, its ballet, Russia, and Russian politics can only, however, be traced in gestures and revealed against mottled backgrounds in occasional close-ups. This book starts with select scenes from the beginning, but ends far from the end. The focus here falls only on the ballet, although the Bolshoi is, of course, a world-famous opera house as well; opera is excluded from the discussion, except insofar as it might illuminate the ballet, the national brand’s signature product. Ultimately, like ballet itself, this book proves paradoxical in documenting at times disenchanting truths—the complicated existences of the dancers, their art, and its venue—in hopes of at least suggesting what might be sublime, what might redeem, what could still elevate us above it all.

  . 1 .

  THE SWINDLING MAGICIAN

  FROM THE START, the Bolshoi Theater was rife with political and financial intrigue. On March 17, 1776 (O.S.), Catherine the Great granted Prince Urusov of Moscow exclusive rights for the presentation of entertainments using performers foreign and domestic, including serf theaters. The license was granted for ten years, but just four years later, in 1780, it ended up in the hands of an Englishman named Michael Maddox. He ran the theater, then called the Petrovsky, into the ground. The tale of his mysterious business practices long pre-dates the sensational productions of the Bolshoi, but he made the theater fascinating.

  MADDOX WAS EITHER a mathematician or a tightrope walker during his youth, and the theater that he helped to found in Moscow either employed professional actors or exploited the talents of orphans—all depending on what half-remembered tale is to be believed. Actual evidence is scant. Maddox advertised his magic shows in Moscow and St. Petersburg newspapers, signed official papers, and implored government officials for forgiveness when he ran into trouble with his numerous creditors.

  The stories about his early years in England have a suspicious amount in common with those of Johann Faust, the traveling magician, fortune-teller, and charlatan best known from Goethe’s nineteenth-century play. Just as Faust boasted of his dealings with the devil by way of self-promotion, so too Maddox considerably embellished the facts in the anecdotes he shared about himself. And like Faust, Maddox found himself immortalized in fiction after his death; the Russian writer Alexander Chayanov set one of his gothic short stories in the Petrovsky Theater. Planned for four years but built in just five months, the Petrovsky hosted all manner of entertainments, from ballets to operas to expertly translated Shakespearean dramas to masquerades. Trifling accounts survive about fabulous stage machinery meant to render astonishing meteorological and seismic disturbances. Characters seemed to pass through the floors and walls, while adolescent girls reportedly exposed intimate surfaces in the corps de ballet. Maddox pledged “cumulative” (meaning “harmonious”) entertainments, but he ran afoul of the imperial censors and lost some of his greatest actors to a rival troupe in St. Petersburg.1 He was also competing with the noblemen who maintained serf orchestras, including the magnate Nikolay Sheremetyev, who had the resources to perform, for a few elites, ballets and operas at his estate outside of Moscow. The competition intensified when Maddox, a popular-theater man, reached past burlesque to offer more substantive fare. He failed to increase his audience. Upper nobles had their serfs to entertain them, and the pious, including the old merchant families of Moscow, stayed away. Maddox went bankrupt, and then, in 1805, his theater burned down—as candlelit, coal-heated theaters with wooden roofs were wont to do. His Jewishness was to blame for the fiasco, anti-Semitic gossip held, even if he had been baptized a Catholic.2

  MADDOX LEFT NO LIKENESS, and no references to his appearance exist beyond mention of the crimson cloak he wore year after year. The description of the theater in Chayanov’s fictional story is based on research by the author’s wife, Olga, a cultural historian. For Maddox himself, Chayanov relied on his mind’s eye, embellishing the contemporaneous accounts of the impresario’s “diabolical will” with a reference to “infernal breathing.” The protagonist of the story glimpses Maddox during an opera, illuminated by the chandeliers that remained lit during the performance, as was then the custom. He is imagined sitting amid “undulating waves of blue and black tailcoats, fluttering fans and sparkling lorgnettes, silk bodices and Brabant lace capes.” Maddox exits the auditorium before the second act; the protagonist follows through vaguely lit corridors, up and down stone staircases, past the dressing room of a soprano singing the part of a shackled slave. Maddox is described as tall, with a dusting of gray hair, dressed in a coat of antique cut, oddly blank in affect. “There were no tongues of fire circling him, no stink of sulphur; everything about him seemed quite ordinary and normal,” the novelist writes, “but this diabolical ordinariness was saturated with meaning and power.”3

  Maddox comes and goes in the story, which ends in the slush outside of the theater, the protagonist encased in the Moscow night and an atmosphere of neurosis.

  The real Michael Maddox was born in England on May 14, 1747, though he claimed to have ancient Russian roots. His Protestant ancestors had immigrated to Russia in the seventeenth century, the era of the Catholic Stuart monarchy, to escape religious persecution. He was the sole surviving son of the English actor Tom Maddox, “who with all his family and troupe” perished in a cargo-boat crash near the Port of Holyhead—all “except one infant who floated ashore in a cradle.”4 The orphan was raised by his uncle, Seward, a trumpeter. Following in his father’s footsteps, Maddox became an entertainer, performing tightrope acts in the 1750s at Haymarket Theatre and Covent Garden in London. He balanced a mere three feet above the stage, less to reduce the danger to himself than to his audience. Toward the end of the act, he would hover on one foot while balancing a straw on the edge of a glass and plinking a fiddle. Other anecdotes from London have him blowing a horn and banging a drum on the slack wire. He also tumbled and conducted unspecified physical and mechanical experiments. Outside of London he acted in saltbox theaters and manipulated fairground puppets, with Punch as his favorite. In York “during race week,” he and his troupe performed morning and evening at Merchants Adventurers’ Hall, among other venues.5 In the southwest English town of Bath, he entertained ladies and gentlemen along with the servants who held their places while their masters mingled at Simpson’s Rooms. “For a considerable salary,” Maddox pivoted and swung above the audience while balancing a coach wheel and juggling a dozen balls.6

  Lore has it that Maddox was engaged in mysterious business dealings throughout Europe, which perhaps explains his connections to the English and Russian diplomats (George Macartney and Nikita Panin) who brokered his first visit to Russia in January 1767. Notice of his tightrope act appeared in St. Petersburg in October of that year. The language in the newspaper bulletin suggested a certain age-of-curiosities excitement about Maddox’s debut in the imperial capital: “Herewith it is declared that the celebrated English equilibrist Michael Maddox will be demonstrating his art in the wood winter home, to which all inclined respectable individuals are invited.”7

  Maddox went to Russia without means—and without knowing the language—but managed, after falsely claiming an Oxford education and some teaching experience, to find work amusing Pavel I, son of the Russian empress, Catherine the Great. Pavel was delighted by his new tutor’s “Cours de recréations mathematique et physiques.”8 Maddox must have exceeded expectations, and Catherine declared her gratitude to h
im in the form of an official letter of commendation. That kept him away from the rabble of the fairground.

  He returned to London to direct a theater, but in the 1770s St. Petersburg lured him back. Maddox shelved the magic shows for clock making and the invention of fanciful automatons, including music-box dancers. In tribute to his benefactress, Catherine the Great, he designed an elaborate clock whose bronze and crystal figurines allegorized her achievements. The figure of Hercules, who represented Russia’s suppression of Sweden, stood in the middle of three columns atop a music box. The base was formed by statues of maidens gesturing toward the four corners of the Earth. Every five minutes—the preferred length of meetings at Catherine’s court—chimes rang and miniature eagles dropped jewels from the top of the columns into the open beaks of eaglets in their nests. The gilded vignette was meant to illustrate how the Russian empire nurtured its conquered territories. Engravings on the pedestal and atop the music box showed stars, planets, and the rays of the sun. Catherine the Great herself never saw or heard the clock, however, having died of a stroke in 1796, a decade before Maddox completed it. It was privately sold then put on public display, and during the Revolution confiscated by the state. Eventually, in 1929, it ended up in the Kremlin Armory.

  The peregrinations of showmen led to appearances in other Russian cities, including the comparative backwater of Moscow, where the nongovernmental university newspaper Moskovskiye vedomosti (Moscow gazette) announced an exhibition of Maddox’s curiosities. Apparently the show found a following. In a subsequent bulletin from February 1776, he offered (through his Russian-language scribe) heartfelt thanks to the Moscow public for making the show such a huge success, solicitously adding that “after the end of this month the showings will cease, and so as not to deprive pleasure from those desiring to take them in once more, an invitation to attend is with all suitable deference extended.”9 He was mindful of competition from other entertainers. The “mechanic and mathematician M. Megellus” also plied his wares in the same newspaper, advertising exhibitions of “various wonders” at the parish of St. John Baptist for 1 ruble (50 kopecks for the cheap seats).10 The newspaper is crowded with varied squibs that survey the social, cultural, and economic scene at the time. Notices for French-language history books, translations of English publications about plowing, portrait sales, and land auctions appear beneath epigrams to the empress and verses to the New Year. Besides granting space to Maddox, Megellus, and the occasional freak show, Moskovskiye vedomosti printed stories from afar: that of the 175-year-old Argentinian man and the beef-and-millet diet that sustained him, and that of the “girl, age seven or eight, from the French village of Savigné-l’Évêque, who has sprouted hair all over her body and has a beard and moustache hanging from her chin down to her shoulders.”11 Weather reports appeared after the fact: “There was thunder and lightning yesterday afternoon at 5 o’clock and some hail fell, but it did not last for long.”12

  In Moscow, Maddox improvised an existence for himself as an impresario, catering to a public in search of amusement. Entertainment was prohibited during the Orthodox fasting periods, but even at other times, there was little to do. Maddox sought to fill the void by opening a theater and soon came into possession of one. But not on his own, and not without taking on (then running afoul of) dangerous creditors, the Old Believer merchants who had loaned him thousands of rubles in goods for his enterprise and who did not appreciate his refusal to repay them. Maddox became, in their eyes, the Antichrist, and Moscow needed to be cleansed of his presence.

  Maddox also clashed with the xenophobic commander of Moscow, and with a powerful politician who had opened a theater of his own on the grounds of the Imperatorskiy Vospitatel’nïy dom, the Imperial Foundling Home. Once that territorial dispute was resolved, Maddox came to depend on the talented children of the orphanage to dance in his ballets and sing in his operas. For ever after, Moscow had its theater, and the theater had its school.

  THE MOSCOW THAT Maddox made home was harsh, a city of tanneries and slaughterhouses, altogether lacking the stern neoclassical grace of St. Petersburg. Fires presented the greatest hazard, since most of the non-government buildings, including the churches, were made of wood. The dead were also a problem. The bubonic plague of 1771 felled a third of the population, including two of Maddox’s potential rivals for control of theatrical entertainments in the city. (At the time, the core of Moscow comprised the area between the white defensive walls of the Kremlin and the outer ditch, gates, and ramparts—what became, by the end of the eighteenth century, the Boulevard Ring.) Cemeteries, like factories, crowded the center until Catherine the Great ordered them relocated beyond the ramparts into the artisan suburbs. The empress disdained Moscow: “besides sickness and fires there is much stupidity there,” which recalled “the beards” of the boyars who had ruled it before her time.13 She and her courtiers invaded the Kremlin for her no-expense-spared coronation, but she otherwise kept her distance. Compared to St. Petersburg, the imperial capital on the Gulf of Finland, thirteen postal stations north, Moscow was dissolute, depraved. Upon recognizing that it needed her divine intervention, Catherine drained the swamp, literally, by ordering the encasement of the tributaries of the Moscow River in subterranean pipes. The empress was benevolent when convenient, repressive when required. She quashed the revolt of 1773, for example, but counseled compassion when it came to the execution of the rebels, whose ranks included peasants, former convicts, religious dissenters, and Cossacks. Torture was discouraged, as was the public display of corpses. But such decorum was not extended to the leader of the rebels, Yemelyan Pugachev. He was hauled to Moscow from Kazakhstan in a metal cage, then decapitated and dismembered in Bolotnaya Square.

  Prussian by birth, Catherine ascended to the throne in 1762 after securing the arrest of her puerile husband, Peter III. He had ruled Russia for just half a year, enacting a series of halfhearted reforms that aided the poor but offended the lower noble ranks. They forced him to abdicate, after which he was placed under house arrest in his manor in Ropsha. Catherine allowed him to keep his servant, dog, and violin, but not his lover. In July 1762, he died, cause unknown. Alexei Orlov, the coup-plotting brother of Catherine’s own lover, blamed Peter’s death on a drunken quarrel with his guards. Catherine attributed his demise to cowardice. “His heart was excessively small, and also dried up,” she recalled, after ordering his bruised corpse opened up.14 She described the day she became empress (before her husband’s death) with more warmth:

  I was almost alone at Peterhof [Palace], amongst my women, seemingly forgotten by everyone. My days, however, were much disturbed, for I was regularly informed of all that was plotting both for and against me. At six o’clock on the morning of the 28th, Alexei Orlov entered my room, awoke me, and said very quietly, “It is time to get up; everything is prepared for proclaiming you.” I asked for details. He replied, “Pacik [Peter III] has been arrested.” I no longer hesitated, but dressed hastily, without waiting to make my toilet, and entered the carriage which he had brought with him.15

  As empress, Catherine rose at dawn to attend to affairs of state, ensuring that meetings did not exceed the five-minute span Maddox would represent in his clock. She maintained a discreet but adventurous love life; the goings-on in her bedchamber later prompted ludicrous Soviet-era gossip about decadent sexual practices, including bestiality. Official records reveal that she overhauled the Russian legal system, pushed the boundaries of the empire westward, and ordered the construction of more than a hundred towns in eleven provinces. Besides the establishment of the Imperial Foundling Home, her educational reforms in Moscow included the opening of two gymnasia under the aegis of Moscow University. The first of these was for the sons and daughters of noblemen, the second for the sons and daughters of commoners. Some of Maddox’s eleven children attended the latter.

  TO OPERATE HIS THEATER, Maddox needed a partner from the upper noble ranks. He found it in the Moscow provincial prosecutor, Prince Pyotr Urusov. Among the pr
ince’s duties was overseeing the masquerades, fairground booths, strongmen, and trained bears of Moscow. In March 1776, the governor general of Moscow, Mikhaíl Volkonsky, granted the prince a decade-long exclusive permit for theatrical presentations. Urusov had earlier collaborated with an Italian impresario, Melchiore Groti, but the relationship soured, and Groti vanished “to God knows where” with the costumes and the salaries owed to the staff.16 The municipal police could not catch him. Maddox came to Urusov’s rescue, convincing him of the financial and logistical benefits of a partnership while also mesmerizing him with visions of fantastic spectacles to be staged in dedicated spaces. Since there was no shortage of unemployed professional actors in Moscow, neither Urusov nor Maddox thought to enlist amateur talent—namely, the girls and boys who were being taught four hours per day, four days per week, on the grounds of the Imperial Foundling Home. The actors from the bankrupt Moscow Public Theater would suffice, along with some serfs.

  On August 31, 1776, Urusov and Maddox formalized their relationship. The contract between them was certified by the police and survives in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. It runs just four lines, the first reaffirming Urusov’s ten-year monopoly, after which, in 1786, Maddox would be granted a ten-year monopoly of his own. Tucked into the mix was the unusual detail that Maddox was to provide 3,100 rubles a year to the Imperial Foundling Home. His contribution to the drama and music school on its grounds did not mean, at the time, that he could exploit the talents of the orphans. That was a later development that would arise when he fulfilled the last stipulation in the agreement with Urusov: the construction, by 1781, of a proper theater in Moscow. Advertised as entertainment for the entire nation, the theater was to be built of stone and surrounded by a moat for the prevention of fires. Its “accessories” were at once to pamper its patrons and improve the skyline.17