Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  The confrontation with the merchants was postponed as the financial standing of the existing theater continued to deteriorate. Between 1786 and 1791 the Petrovsky stagnated. Frustrated by the repertoire choices and miserable salaries, some of Maddox’s star performers relocated to St. Petersburg and the Imperial Theaters. Leased serfs and the orphanage provided replacements, including some true talents. Maddox hired Arina Sobakina and Gavrila Raykov, two comic dancers taught by Paradis, as well as the great actor Andrey Ukrasov, purported to be a trendsetter among young Muscovites—but these overexposed, underpaid performers could not, on their own merits, keep the Petrovsky afloat.

  Maddox could not pay interest on his debt, much less pay down the principal, and his efforts in 1786 to solicit even more funding from the Opekunskiy sovet predictably came to naught. He was branded a deadbeat. His merchant lenders renewed their demands for repayment, raising the interest rates and threatening him with prison. He tried to plead his case in St. Petersburg, “going there during the winter for five months and in the end leaving my petition behind without any hope of it being taken up.”48 Then, back in Moscow that same year before the governing board, he fell to his knees: “Since I have no means whatsoever to settle my debts, that which is owed to the orphanage and my particular creditors,” he begged, “I find myself for faithful payment with no recourse but to surrender the entire matter to the governing board, and with it to surrender myself, all of my possessions and the income they provide, in free will to the management of the governing board.”49

  With that, the theater on Petrovka Street, later known as the Bolshoi, became a government operation. The Opekunskiy sovet assumed complete control over the building and its finances. Maddox retained the title of general director, along with a budget of 27,000 rubles to pay his performers, the doctor, the furnace stoker, and the hairdresser. His salary was pegged to the success of the ballets and operas that he staged—5,000 rubles if receipts from the performances exceeded 50,000 rubles, 3,000 rubles if not. If, as was expected, expenses outweighed receipts, then he would receive nothing, not even firewood and candles for his apartment. To survive, Maddox appealed to the masses, staging more comedies than tragedies. The rich regarded him with suspicion, but he had a common touch. His repertoire choices showed his preference for exuberant childlike characters, mad dreamers rather than representatives of boring convention. Characters like him.

  In the first year of the new arrangement, he earned his 5,000 rubles, relying on the advice of noblemen with an avid interest in the theater when sorting out the season. Some of these noblemen operated private serf theaters and were no less keen to keep tabs on Maddox as he was on them. They approved the good and censored the bad—not just those works that offended etiquette, but also those whose actors failed to emote, or whose dancers botched the bourrée.

  The government too stepped in. Alexander Prozorovsky, an arch-conservative, anti-Enlightenment figure, took a special interest in Maddox and his business dealings. He had been appointed governor general of Moscow in an effort to prevent a repeat, in imperial Russia, of the fall of the Bastille in Paris. The delights of his command of Moscow included book-burning parties, the suppression of occult groups and non-Orthodox religious sects, the Freemasons in particular, and the recruitment of spies to monitor the comings and goings of potential insurrectionists.

  The Petrovsky fell outside of Prozorovsky’s control, which made Maddox a target of special investigation. The governor general sought to prove that Maddox had been negligent in fulfilling the duties granted him by the empress, and to negate the exclusive rights that remained in force despite his financial ruin. Confusion dominates his reports to Catherine, and to the noblemen’s club, as to whether Maddox’s exclusive rights terminated in 1791 or 1796. Maddox of course defended the latter date, but the proof the governor general demanded could not be found, neither in Maddox’s home nor in the files of Mikhaíl Volkonsky, the deceased governor general of Moscow, nor in police records. Maddox claimed that the papers granting him his privilege had mysteriously vanished. When pressed, he argued that the papers had been destroyed in the fire that had occurred back in February of 1780, in the three-sided wooden theater on Znamenka Street. Likewise next to nothing remained of the architectural plan, including the model, of the theater on Petrovka Street. The original architect, Christian Rosberg, informed the chief of police that Maddox had confiscated the model from him, but when the plan and model were demanded of him, by threat of force, all that Maddox managed to produce were the keys to a drawer filled with moldy, indecipherable scraps of paper. In the absence of documents legitimizing Maddox’s theatrical activities, the governor general ordered the chief of police to extract an affidavit from Maddox “to add to the file.”50 The noblemen running Moscow under Prozorovsky blanched at the thought of buying Maddox out for 250,000 rubles, as he proposed.

  Having failed to discredit Maddox, Prozorovsky resorted to extreme measures. He turned to the court with the unfounded allegation that Maddox’s house, which stood on the grounds of the Petrovsky Theater, had been built with embezzled funds. The petition failed, after which, with extreme malice, Prozorovsky directed the police to burn the house down, no questions asked. The order was not carried out. The denouement of the drama involved Prozorovsky ordering a punitive inspection of the theater and scolding Maddox for its deficiencies:

  It is my duty to say that you ought to endeavor to keep said theater unsoiled and maintain in it plentiful heat and yet forestall any suffocating fumes … The hall in which you perform is riddled with a multitude of grave errors of architecture, though for this not you but the architect is at fault, and in so great a hall there is but one ingress and egress, and the only other way out is by means of a vile rope ladder. My predecessor had ordered an atrium to be erected, several years have passed, and yet you are not even thinking about it, and so I demand and assert that you must at all costs this coming summer raise that atrium, or else I will order your theater shut down until such time as it is built.51

  In an attempt to deflect the criticism, Maddox reminded his antagonist of the good things that he had accomplished in his rotting theater, including the absorption of the school for thirty girls and boys and the promotion of the Russian repertoire. Prozorovsky changed the subject in response, shifting his invective from the sagging ceiling to the imperfect personnel:

  It surpasses all understanding that your choir master is deaf, and that the German master of dancing in that ballet was lame, or else crooked-legged, and your ballet master is also old, as is his wife likewise, and no good as a teacher, for you have not a single student of either sex who would be at least tolerable in their dancing.52

  In January 1791 Maddox asked the Opekunskiy sovet to free him from his financial obligation to the orphanage (10 percent of the receipts), as a form of “compassion to the oppressed.”53 The money would then be used to renovate the Petrovsky. The request was approved, but ultimately the matter rested with Betskoy. Maddox persisted, listing all of his services to the Moscow public: the building of the theater and its circular auditorium, the masquerades that he arranged in the Taganka Vauxhall, an investment of 100,000 rubles. The Russian (not Italian) ballets and operas that he produced needed to be taken into account, as well as their sets and costumes. The power brokers relented and, as a “good, humane deed,” bought out his exclusive rights for just over 100,000 rubles while also relieving him of his 10 percent financial commitment to the orphanage, which he had never actually honored.54

  Maddox’s strongest supporters were dead and gone, and the new generation ruling Moscow proved hostile to his endeavors. He had maneuvered from the start to secure the protection of the crown, and he needed it to survive. In the 1790s his theater fell entirely out of fashion, and he into disrepute. His merchant creditors persisted in their campaign to prosecute him and took the time away from feasting, praying, and abusing their wives to dictate a letter to their literate sons for submission to Nikolay Sheremetyev, the owner of a fi
rst-class serf theater who had married, to the shock of the aristocratic establishment, his leading lady. The language of the complaint, dated July 4, 1803, is ornate, stuffed with proverbs, Ryazan dialect, and biblical arcana in the service of invective. The merchants sought to reclaim the 90,000 rubles they were owed, and hoped for Sheremetyev’s assistance in imprisoning Maddox, since he had played them for fools for years, “twisting like a snake and a toad” to avoid his obligations, and leaving them “as helpless as crawfish in a shallow” when it came time to collect.55 Moreover, he had insulted their bushy beards. Arson was not an option. If the Petrovsky was, God forbid, to burn down, the merchants would not recoup their losses. The 90,000 rubles Maddox owed to them—on top of the 250,000 he owed to the governing board—could not be gotten from Maddox’s candle and firewood suppliers, who were also victims of his cunning, nor could it be beaten out of the orphans in the troupe, who would protest, should extortion be attempted, that they had earned their wages through hard toil:

  Verily is this Maddox the craftiest of all living beings, and back when we had not yet learned all his ways and taken full measure of his cunning—to wit, that he pays none of his debts and yet keeps putting away all the profit from the Theater into his own pocket on the sly—back then, while begging us for a reprieve in collecting a payment, would he bawl openly in front of us all, so much so that he could draw pity from stones. And what a master of trickery he is—you can be the smartest merchant in the world, and yet until you get to know him inside and out, he’ll fool you over and over. And towards the end, having dispossessed us of both our wares and our capital, he set off treating us in an impolitic way: in his house did he curse and shout at us, simpletons, solely for our asking for that which was due to us. “How dare you,” he says, “you beard-heads, set your foot in a house of a gentleman? Don’t you,” he says, “know that I, just like the local gentlemen here, carry a sword? And I am,” he says, “made as ever the master of the Theater for all perpetuity.” And so indeed we do believe that he is a man of magnitude, therefore, while all the local powers that be, may the Lord keep them in good health, we approach with no fear whatsoever, were we terrified to even think of showing ourselves before Maddox towards the end. For as it says in the Holy Scripture, “poverty doth humble a man,” and Maddox is nowadays so proud that no cat will want to sit in his lap, and there’s no sign that he is dwelling in poverty, but, he says, “I am only obliged to pay you one and a half thousand rubles a year; that,” he says, “is what it says in the paper that the governing board has. How dare you demand more from me?” And that’s his whole argument. Well, simple-minded as we are, we don’t buy that kind of reasoning and think to ourselves, “Was it not he himself who made it so that he only has to give us that much?” And so the trustees, in their kindness to us, did judge that “Maddox, as they say, is poorest of the poor, nothing more can be gotten from him, and it’s as good an end to a vile state of affairs as can be”—and thought that this would make us content. Will, now, Maddox succeed in having his way with us even here? For if he decided to pay us even one-and-a-half of ten thousand rubles a year, so we are certain as certain can be that the trustees would not hinder him in this but furthermore would commend him for dispensing with grace that which he gathered wickedly.56

  The merchants wanted Maddox to sit in jail until his attitude improved and he opened his purse. But it was not, in the end, in the interest of the governing board to deprive him of the chance to settle his debts with the orphanage. In terms of his finances, Maddox was as “naked as a falcon,” the governing board advised the merchants, but he had the backing of the crown and could not be touched.57 Their desire to see him in a cold, damp prison cell, tormented by parasites, or sent on foot to Siberia, betrayed their ignorance of the perks of aristocratic relationships. Maddox knew these very well. Connecting the budget of his theater with that of the orphanage had shielded him from arrest, leaving his merchant creditors powerless. He would “dive to the bottom of hell” with the 90,000 rubles they had lent him, leaving their children with “no meat for their soup.”58

  By 1794, he was having trouble meeting payroll and found himself begging his stars to accept, in place of a salary, the chance to perform whatever and whenever they liked and keep a large percentage of the proceeds. The arrangement he made along these lines with Pyotr Plavilshchikov, a pudgy, doe-eyed actor committed to representing the plights of the lower ranks, was advertised in Moskovskiye vedomosti on December 13, 1794. “The performance is a benefit for M. Plavilshchikov, who receives no payment from the theater” and asks for “the indulgence of the esteemed public” in “flattering his hope” by attending.59 He performed, then he quit, taking with him the conductor of the orchestra and leaving the public, which took the side of the actors over Maddox, disgusted.

  The crisis deepened in the final year of Catherine the Great’s reign and the first years of her daughter-in-law’s rise to power as spouse of Tsar Paul I. Receiving word of the strife, the empress consort, Mariya, dispatched one of her spies to report on the Petrovsky.60 The spy, Nikolay Maslov, wrote back three weeks later, on November 28, 1799, with a long list of calamities. He complained that the theater changed its shows so unpredictably that actors could not learn their lines in time. Their costumes were often ill kempt, or sometimes even performers simply wore street clothes. Plus the theater and dressing rooms were so frightfully cold that the performers often fell ill. “The management, all the while,” he continued, “rebukes them harshly.”61

  Mariya expressed genuine surprise that the mistreated actors had not taken matters into their own hands and staged a hostile takeover of the theater. The Petrovsky had been bankrupt for at least three years, she realized. It had died along with her mother-in-law, Catherine the Great. Although Maddox announced business as usual in Moskovskiye vedomosti at the end of the official period of mourning for the empress, not even fireworks in the great rotunda could suppress the sad truth. He had nothing in the coffers, no one to clean the stage or bait the mousetraps, no coal to stoke or wood to burn. Still harboring the delusion that he might placate his nemesis, Prozorovsky, he had pledged to repair the theater and offered to heat it in advance of performances, rather than letting the rabble shiver in their stalls. He had also sought to increase receipts with a production of Pygmalion, an Ovid-derived melodrama about a sculptor who, having renounced the pleasures of the flesh, falls in love with one of his own creations. (The goddess Venus takes pity on him and brings the statue to life.) Maddox’s 1794 and 1796 performances of the drama, to sweet music by the Bohemian violinist Georg Benda, succeeded, but most of his other stagings of the period failed. The entire theatrical enterprise had fallen to pieces, and no one from the Moscow aristocratic establishment wanted to clean up the mess. Maddox sent a long letter to Mariya in 1802 in hopes that the orphanage would assume his debts and he would be allowed to retire from twenty-six years of service to Russian culture with his dignity intact. Following an audit that found both the theater and the orphanage awash in red ink, Mariya ordered the liquidation of Maddox’s estate.

  The debts to the Opekunskiy sovet exceeded 300,000 rubles, which Tsar Paul, Mariya’s husband, absorbed on behalf of the crown. The Ryazan-Moscow boyars, for all their colorful invective, did not get their 90,000 rubles back.

  The Petrovsky Theater closed, in ghastly fashion, on Sunday, October 8, 1805. At three o’clock, just before a performance of the popular mermaid spectacle Lesta, or the Dnepr Water Nymph, a spark became a flame, which became an inferno. The theater burned for the next three hours, a conflagration seen far and wide. The curious gawked; police, theater workers, and firemen milled helplessly around. The cause of the blaze was a subject of speculation. Two eyewitnesses, gentle people in their dotage, proposed that the Day of Judgment had at long last arrived for Maddox and his scandalsinged theater. Lesta was a benign thing, a comic opera that retold an old legend of a mermaid who pines for a prince, but the ladies in question thought it was demonic, a horror of the im
agination that offended the Christians in the audience. God intervened before the curtain went up.

  Most simply blamed the fire on carelessness in the cloakroom. Someone had knocked over a candle, setting the lining of a coat alight; his or her frantic efforts to stamp out the flames had failed. Such would have been typical of Maddox’s underpaid employees, the nobleman playwright Stepan Zhikharev explained, “the whole lot, each one being thicker-headed than the next.”62 Zhikharev watched from a distance: “We saw the enormous glow of a fire over Moscow and stood for a long time in bewilderment, wondering what could be burning so intensely. A postman coming from Moscow explained that the theater on Petrovka was on fire and that the fire brigade in all of its strength was unable to defend it.”63