Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  When Morelli became feeble, Maddox turned to Pietro Pinucci and his wife, Columba, who in their three years at the helm increased the number of ballets produced annually at the Petrovsky from twenty-five to thirty-five. Some gained a toehold in the repertoire, but most were forgotten, the two-part dances mixed and matched together for use as entr’actes or interludes under different names.

  The role of ballet master thereafter fell to Giuseppe Salomone II, who danced with his much more famous father in London, Vienna, and Milan before finding work with Maddox. He made his debut in Moscow in 1784 with The Fountain of Good and Bad Fortune. His name and those of his three daughters, all musicians, recur in the sources. He is the one Petrovsky ballet master with whom some specific principles can be associated, owing to his mid-career tutelage under the Parisian Noverre, who called for the transformation of ballet from a cheerfully banal confection into a plot-driven, narrative art—an art of grittier, grimmer sentiment. Pantomime was to lend the old noble steps gravitas. The theory was put into practice and acquired a name: ballet d’action. Salomone set several of Noverre’s ballets at the Petrovsky, elevating the genre from simple-minded caprice, but in the process he alienated his audiences. Ballet was supposed to entertain, gaily, with the dancers bursting into street songs, banging drums, and changing their costumes up to eight times per show. It was meant to titillate, not educate—at least not while a retired tightrope walker was in charge.

  OVER THE COURSE of his time at the Petrovsky, Maddox produced more than four hundred Russian and foreign ballets, operas, and dramas—including a significant production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute in 1794. The light comic opera The Miller Who Was Also a Magician, a Swindler, and a Matchmaker settled into the repertoire, and for those seeking other delights, the masquerade hall proved popular. From the very beginning, however, expenses outweighed receipts, bringing Maddox into serious legal conflict with one of his designers, Félix Delaval, who sued over unpaid wages and the dishonor of having been turned out on the street. Maddox defended himself by impugning Delaval’s character. “Mr. Delaval came to the hall to ask me for money,” he wrote in a kind of affidavit. “I told him that he had already been given extra, but that if he showed me his mastery I would pay him what he had been promised. He responded with very harsh words and left, but came back two days later and began to blaspheme me in the presence of Captain Alexander Semyonov and the actor Ivan Kaligraf, and also uttered obscenities to Captain Alexander Semyonov, and a few days before that struck the soldier standing on guard.”33 Maddox ended up losing the case and had to compensate Delaval for lost wages, 60 rubles in candles, and 25 rubles in firewood.

  Maddox muddled through these and other conflicts, scrimping on salaries, candles, and firewood, and ignoring the resulting complaints about the chilliness in the hall. But in 1783, his third year running the Petrovsky Theater, he faced a grave threat to his livelihood from an unlikely place: the orphanage. The crisis began when Maddox clashed with a senior official in the imperial government, Ivan Betskoy. Betskoy served as personal assistant to Catherine the Great on matters related to educational enlightenment and presided over the Imperial Academy of the Arts. Betskoy had founded the orphanage in 1763 and subsequently demonstrated, in the remaining years of his life, a sincere concern for the children under his care.

  The orphanage, an immense quadrangle, was located on a bend of the Moscow River, adjacent to the Moscow market district called Kitay-gorod. The name now translates as Chinatown, but the ramshackle collection of stalls and workshops had nothing remotely Chinese about it. (The archaic Russian word kita refers to plaiting or braiding, and it is thought that basket weavers once plied their trade in the area.) The Opekunskiy sovet managed the finances of the orphanage, and advertisements for its mortgage brokerage and pawnshop appeared in Moskovskiye vedomosti. Funding came from a lucrative 5-kopeck tax on playing cards. (The empress decreed that the packages would show the symbol of the orphanage—a stork—along with the slogan “She feeds her chicks absent concern for herself.”)34 There were also discreet donations from noblemen who had fathered children out of wedlock and a separate tax on public entertainments. Enough money was left over after basic expenses to import musical instruments from abroad, together with colored pencils, “bows,” and “screws.”35 The orphans assumed the surnames of the princes and princesses who funded their care (the twenty orphans supported each year at the bequest of Princess Marianna Gessen-Gomburgskaya took the last surname Gomburtsev, for example), but the imperial pedigree did not spare them from manual labor in factories and mills in their adulthoods.

  Betskoy had conceived the orphanage as a school of manners for the emancipated children of serfs, those whose parents had died in the bubonic plague, or those who had been abandoned by soldiers and peasants. By improving the lives of these unfortunates, Betskoy imagined fostering a third caste, an enlightened middle class between the nobles and peasants. Inspired by the Enlightenment thinkers Locke and Rousseau, he argued in his elegant fashion that children come into the world neither good nor evil, but like a wax seal into which anything could be etched. The boys and girls at the orphanage were to be imprinted with laudable inclinations: love of hard work, fear of idleness, compassion, politeness, tidiness, and cleanliness. Engineering the heart and soul was as essential as training the intellect. Tutoring in foreign languages and the arts, including dance, music, and theater, was meant to shield the children from baser influences. The first children to learn ballet were the offspring of palace servants. But shocking death rates at the orphanage (even instances of dead and dying babies being left at the door), an epidemic of child abuse, and tales of embezzlement sullied Betskoy’s plans. He offered rewards for the rescue of babies from gutters and troughs and could not countenance that the shelter he had opened for them lacked the proper resources—including wet nurses—to keep them alive. Some of the pain he felt on behalf of his older adoptees can be detected in a letter that he wrote to the governing board, protesting the use of corporal punishment and harshness of the cabinet- and textile-making rooms:

  As a result of various rumors circulating here I have learned that the wards, especially those of the female sex, are being brought up in a manner quite disgraceful; I do not mean that they should be taught to be vain and prideful, for true education cannot consist in that, but one ought to find a mean, so that a human being could esteem the human in himself and yet know how to be equal to one’s station, whatever that may be, and, allowing no one to treat him as if he were a beast, would wish to fulfill, with diligence and as if it were an honor, all obligations imposed upon him in accordance with said station. Above all they say about those wards who have been apprenticed to manufacturers, and in particular about those assigned to Tanauer, that they are being kept in conditions that are in no way commensurate with human society, and are worse than those befitting servile commoners.36

  As always, ideals collided with reality, one that clean forks and bowls and napkins changed every three days could not conceal, except for foreign guests, whose impression of the place was that of a Potemkin village, the children dancing around the beaming director in gratitude for their lamb and rice and iron beds. Behind the scenes, maidens were raped by the staff—a serious matter, since pregnant single women risked savage beatings to precipitate miscarriages and the perilous disgrace of banishment to Siberia. For other wards, the experience of the Enlightenment consisted of toiling in overheated, unventilated rooms, winding cotton and spinning flax, being flogged with knouts if their quotas went unmet. Few of them sang; even fewer danced.

  Betskoy, the proud, stout representative of the proud, stout empress, ensured that visitors came away with a positive impression. In the autumn of 1786, Sir Richard Worsley (an English statesman and antiquities collector) traveled to Moscow on the back end of a European tour, noting the potholed roads leading into the city but also the “noble view” of churches and palaces from six kilometers out. He dined with Maddox on September 27 and 30, going to
the theater after the first meal and raising glasses to the health of counts, countesses, and their children at the noblemen’s club after the second. The singers were better than the actors in Maddox’s enterprise, Worsley believed, adding that just one of the actors survived the merciless heckling from the parterre to give “general satisfaction.” Worsley included a visit to the orphanage on his itinerary, and describes in his memoirs the “innocuous” but soon-to-be “augmented” building that gave shelter to 4,000 orphans “who are taught music, geography and moral history.” The girls, he adds, “embroider and make very good lace.” The director, Georg Gogel, talked him through the budget: “The expense of the different masters and teachers who overlook the children amounts annually to 40,000 rubles, the fixed pension of this hospital from the crown is 70,000 rubles, besides which they are supposed to have a fund of some 3 million, which they lend out at interest.” Overall, Worsley found the place “admirably well conducted, and each child has a bed, the girls are in a ward by themselves, and the dinner throughout the whole is changed twice a week. There is also a small collection of natural history, to instruct those who are to follow that pursuit, a music room and a library. The wards for the lying-in women are in another separate building, where the women may come when they please, and return home without the least expense, nor can any question whatever be asked them.” A touch of wryness: “I was informed by the director that great advantage of this part of the institution was taken by the nobility.”37 (Worsley could sympathize: His estranged wife, Seymour Fleming, had given birth to a boy fathered by another man and was rumored to have taken more than two dozen lovers in 1782 alone.)

  At least at first, the entertainments put on by the orphans were intended just for the children themselves, their minders, and visiting dignitaries. Little survives of these performances beyond playbills and unspecific anecdotes. In 1778, Count Pyotr Sheremetyev attended a play and a Russian comic opera and was impressed enough to “perpetuate the pleasure he had expressed verbally by donating one hundred rubles” for distribution to “orphans of both sexes in the theater.”38 The children also put on a ballet on a subject of dubious moral content: Shakespeare’s lascivious poem Venus and Adonis, in which a goddess takes a mortal lover by force. On other occasions they performed “Chinese shadows,” which entailed speaking their lines behind screen partitions and waging great battles with their hands and fingers.39 Since these were private events, the performances did not pose a threat to Maddox. But in 1783 a baron and donor (Ernst Wanzura) petitioned the empress to license the in-house theater for public performances. Catherine agreed, and the orphanage went into the entertainment business, mounting French and Russian dramas, operas, and pantomime-harlequinades.

  The English cleric William Coxe supplies a precious, albeit vague, eyewitness account of one of these shows, coupled with an expression of surprise at the absence of “unwholesome smells” in the nursery and the sweetness of the bread baked by the oldest orphans for feeding to the youngest at sunrise and sunset. The performers “constructed the stage, painted the scenes, and made the dresses” for the comic opera he attended. During the performance, they “trod the stage” with ease. “There were some agreeable voices,” and “the orchestra was filled with a band by no means contemptible, which consisted entirely of foundlings, except the first violin, who was their music master.” Coxe heard the singers but did not see dancers, since “on this occasion the play was not, as usual, concluded with a ballet, because the principal performer was indisposed, which was no small disappointment, as we were informed that they dance ballets with great taste and elegance.”40

  Seeking permission to continue operating the theater, the director of the orphanage boasted of the success of these performances to Betskoy in a letter dated June 13, 1784: “Each day our theater gets a little better, to the greatest satisfaction of the public. The directors of the noblemen’s club … informed me that their members intend to send a letter of gratitude to the governing board, including 2,000 rubles in this letter to be shared among the orphans who have distinguished themselves in the theater.”41

  Betskoy did not share the noblemen’s delight and abandoned his phlegmatic demeanor to voice his outrage. He attended one of the ballets and was appalled, seeing not images of “great taste and elegance” but filthiness, postures fit for a “brothel theater.”42 He feared the orphanage theater becoming like the larger serf theaters operating in Moscow during the period—places of impure pleasures, whose vulnerable female performers did more for their masters than dance and sing.

  Unaware that Betskoy was planning to abolish the orphanage theater, Maddox flew into a rage, or at least pretended to, about the violation of his privilege. First he sent the police to warn the publisher of Moskovskiye vedomosti against promoting the orphanage theater, and then he took the matter to the imperial court. Long forgotten was Maddox’s own plan, back in 1779, for the orphanage to invest in the building of his theater. For his change of heart, Betskoy turned against him and judged his character suspect. Soon Maddox had a different agenda, one that he expressed to the governor general of Moscow, Zakhar Chernïshov. “Lend the hand of benevolence to a foreigner who surrenders his entire being to the justness of your Most Gracious Majesty,” he pleaded with fake innocence, and “consider the unfortunate predicament of my family and those who have entrusted their capital to me.”43 The rhetoric did Maddox no good. The governor general took the matter to the empress, who instructed him to settle it on his own. Betskoy, for his part, also sent a letter to Chernïshov, expressing astonishment that a “foreigner who has come to enrich himself” could have the “impudence” to claim control over that which was most “sacred”: control of the nation’s culture.44

  The court declared that the orphanage was permitted to operate a theater irrespective of Maddox’s exclusive rights. Incongruously, given his initial protests, the decision allowed him to solve his financial problems—at least for the moment. He proposed absorbing the orphanage theater into his own enterprise, pledging to cover the costs of “an apartment and firewood” and restraining himself from “selling” the girls “for money.”45 He also proposed helping those orphans “who wished to pursue happiness elsewhere” by negotiating their contracts with other parties—a sly way of keeping tabs on the competition, but also perhaps an acknowledgment of the miserly salaries and grievous contractual bondage he was offering.46 Maddox also said that he would hire the dance, music, and acting teachers of the orphanage for the Petrovsky. And he agreed to purchase, for 4,000 rubles, the costumes and props that the orphans had been using.

  The sleight of hand was Maddox’s repeated insistence on also operating the orphanage theater—but not the orphanage theater that had been in operation for the past year. Maddox proposed to expand his public theater empire by selling that structure and opening another one in Kitay-gorod, one that would be bigger, sturdier, and potentially more lucrative. His conniving drew a heated response from a member of the governing board:

  As regards the notion, to my mind unimaginable, that the wooden theater deeded by Her Majesty be sold at a public auction, such stipulations astonish me. For where will our wards, then, perform? Surely not in a theater erected in the auditorium in the orphanage’s central corpus? In that case we would have to invite inside the orphanage the municipal police and defer to its authority, since its presence is required whenever public entertainments are staged, with the entire city flocking to the very locale to which no stranger ought to be admitted.47

  Maddox would drop the idea of building a second theater, though not before securing funding for it from the governing board, earning him the reputation of the cleverest of the clever when it came to financial dealings.

  The negotiations lasted several months and were freighted with suspicion by those noblemen who thought the Petrovsky evil, a disreputable place guaranteed to harm the orphans, soil them inside. But after much agonizing and rewriting of the contracts, Maddox got his way: He received fifty ballet pupils, twen
ty-four actors, and thirty musicians from the orphanage and all but 10 percent of the income from their exploitation. The agreement reflected the notion that bad could be turned into good, that the orphans would cleanse Maddox’s theater, rather than being soiled by it. Such had been the justification for involving the orphanage in the selling of playing cards and pawning of jewelry. These sinful activities became noble when used to rescue homeless children from the streets and enlighten the masses. Maddox too was liberated by the idea that the ends justified the means. Financial crimes became pious in the service of the ballets and operas performed at the Petrovsky, or what Maddox began to refer to as the Grand Theater, “the Bolshoi.”

  Maddox retained his monopoly. Neither the orphanage nor its instructors nor the foreign theatrical troupes that the orphanage had brought to Moscow could operate without his consent. And by bringing the orphanage theater under the aegis of the Petrovsky, Maddox managed to shield himself from his merchant creditors, to whom he owed, they alleged, 90,000 rubles. Some of what he took from them came in the form of cash, but he had also relied on them for building materials and furniture. Banks as institutions did not yet exist in Russia, and the magnates and moneylenders of Poland had not been integrated into the empire. Maddox had no option but to seek loans from a claque of Ryazan-Moscow merchants, who for centuries had been the sole group in Russia with serious amounts of cash at their disposal. The poet Alexander Pushkin borrowed from the merchants, as did the state, but it was unprecedented for a single individual to be so dependent on credit, as opposed to receiving a grant from the empress, to operate a public institution. Having sunk his personal savings from his magic shows and the Taganka neighborhood Vauxhall into the operation of the Petrovsky, Maddox had no practical intention of paying the loans back. He also knew that the barrel-bellied, bearded boyars would seek his hide if he defaulted. His theater—and his safety—rested on receiving the blessing, as well as the protection, of his other creditors: the powerful noblemen of the governing board. Once he had obtained this protection, Maddox took an audacious step. He appealed to the board for additional financing. Apparently Maddox’s ambition, not to mention his slyness, knew no bounds.