Platitudes were the fate of another such potpourri, Svetlana, the Slavic Princess (Svetlana, slavyanskaya knyazhina, 1885), which Bogdanov put on the stage after demanding a raise. “I expect better reward appropriate to the responsibilities of ballet master and director,” he wrote to his supervisors in St. Petersburg, enclosing within his letter a postcard of a ballerina from Dresden whom he wanted to hire “for a small performance fee.” It would be “an experiment,” he argued, for the purposes of “refreshing” the Bolshoi Ballet.17 His greed, along with his obvious bias toward foreign dancers and the garishness of his productions, did not sit well. The dramatist and Bolshoi repertoire inspector Alexander Ostrovsky derided Bogdanov for his “circus performances” and sought to have him fired. Meanwhile the administration of the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg debated whether “new and vulgar” performances in Moscow were better than “old and miserable” ones.18
As the ballet master at the Bolshoi, Bogdanov enforced greater discipline in the ranks, requiring attendance at morning dance lessons in the theater. The quality of the dancing improved. Yet the repertoire imported from France and Italy failed to attract audiences. Critics gnashed their teeth, and much to the dismay of the bookkeepers of the Imperial Theaters, the Bolshoi Ballet did not turn a profit. The accounts were audited, and administrators were no sooner hired than fired or, when bureaucratic rigor mortis set in, had their duties ghosted, covered by others.19
For a time, no one seemed to be in charge of the Bolshoi, as evidenced by the trivial but telling case of the insulted wardrobe manager, Semyon Germanovich. He did not know to whom to complain, in 1882, about the “epithet” thrown in his face by Vladimir Pogozhev, then the acting intendant of the Imperial Theaters in St. Petersburg and Moscow while the actual intendant, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, traveled to Europe. Pogozhev used his time in charge to rid the Bolshoi of independent-minded administrators, sending financial auditors to Moscow and accusing Germanovich and others of cooking the books. “Seven female costumes” for Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser were purchased but never seen, and the batteries ordered by the machinist to illuminate Anton Rubinstein’s opera The Demon were fewer in number and weaker in voltage than invoiced.20 Germanovich’s nasty clash with Pogozhev left a “horrible stain” on his good name.21 He hoped the court would rinse it out, but to no avail. Pogozhev fired him, and it took a long time (eight years, in fact) for the former wardrobe manager to recoup the wages he was due: 90 rubles, 38 kopecks.22 The sourest of grapes fermented in his mind over this matter, and his dislike of the Bolshoi Theater administration turned pathological.
Germanovich’s successor was the twenty-four-year-old Anton Vashkevich, whose mother was a railroad crossing guard. Pogozhev had worked for the railroad before serving the court, which perhaps explains how the lad got the job. Vashkevich held the rank of kollezhskiy registrator, the bottom of the imperial Russian nomenclature, and frankly had no business taking on a senior position at the Bolshoi. His hiring provoked resentment, and he was accused of stealing the salaries meant for the tailors and fitters, spending some of the money on “half bottles of vodka, perhaps more” at a tavern and some more of it on a prostitute picked up in the Moscow Hermitage Garden, before losing the rest. Only the last part of the tale was true, Vashkevich insisted. Although he had taken to drink to calm his nerves, he never, he swore, drank to excess. He had meant to pay the tailors and fitters, but because they were not in the theater at the time, he kept the money on his person. He had been robbed, he claimed, after falling asleep. Vashkevich too had suffered abuse from Pogozhev and feared for his job. “He had been living in a constantly agitated state,” an investigation concluded, “expecting changes in the staffing of the theater.”23
On October 1, 1883, financial problems at the Bolshoi resulted in the shocking dismissal of more than 100 dancers—almost half of the entire roster. The March 27 memorandum laying the groundwork for the purge is merciless:
In view of the expected abolition of the Moscow ballet troupe, the Office of the Imperial Theaters respectfully requests of Moscow the establishment of a Commission to be chaired by the Office of the Moscow Imperial Theaters, inviting ballet master Petipa and chief régisseur [stage manager] L. Ivanov to travel from here to Moscow as participants, and inviting Smirnov from the artists in Moscow—for the purpose of compiling a list of those artists who, qualified for their pensions, could be dismissed from service, as well as those other persons who, through weakness of talent or inability, are no longer of use and would therefore be subject to abandonment by the state.24
The dancers received the news at a most inopportune time—in the middle of a performance of The Demon. Just as they “lifted their left feet in order to run across the stage on the toes of their right ones, a guard approached them to tell them they were out. The stunned dancers fainted, awaking just in time to disturb the peace and calm with their crying and yelling.” Dressed as angels, they fell down in a heap from their wires and were injured. “But still they resisted being fired!”25 Nineteen of the dancers joined the Mariyinsky, only after passing an exam to prove that their legs were not too plump. The dancers learned of their promotion to St. Petersburg by telegram. Older “soloist artists” received their pensions and a modest buyout. The younger, fitter dancers retained by the Bolshoi saw their salaries cut, which was less a problem for the “married ladies” than the single women, who had to assume “the keeping of cows and the selling of milk” to make ends meet.26 (One of the novice milkmaids reportedly canceled a rehearsal to tend to the birth of a calf.) The scandal was sneeringly lampooned by the writer Anton Chekhov, who ridiculed the administration for getting rid of the dancers “politely, quickly, and most importantly, all of a sudden.”27
The upheaval was part of an effort to improve the operations of the Imperial Theaters. A committee formed by Vsevolozhsky, the intendant in St. Petersburg after 1881, arranged for greater oversight of the repertoire plus substantial pay and honoraria increases.28 In some of the theaters morale improved, but not at the Bolshoi Ballet, which, as the March 27 memorandum reveals, seemed all but doomed. The dairy business could not save it, nor the rush to the altar that inevitably followed “any flirtation” between female dancers and affluent Moscow merchants.29 The director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters, actor Pavel Pchelnikov, made it clear in his correspondence that both he and his overseers preferred opera to ballet, and that the best ballets were those that were danced as part of operas. One year after the dismissals, however, he proffered a glimmer of hope, arranging for a handful of the “unfortunates” sacked in 1883 to be rehired for a salary of 300 rubles.30 It was not a living wage but certainly better than “starvation” or “sleeping rough.”31 The reprieve had come from Vsevolozhsky and, through the minister of the court, Tsar Alexander III. Vsevolozhsky argued for the survival of the Bolshoi Ballet, specifically the retention of the older dancers, out of sympathy. They had no other skill besides dancing, he argued; it would be “too harsh” to leave them “without a crust of bread” amid the celebration surrounding the coronation of Tsar Alexander III.32 The tsar found cause to agree with Vsevolozhsky, and allowed the Bolshoi Ballet to continue. The art became an essential decoration for his reign—a reign that, in general, privileged appurtenance and embellishment, a case in point being the Fabergé eggs he gave to the tsarina on special occasions beginning in 1886.
How specifically to keep the Bolshoi Ballet operating was left for Vsevolozhsky, the minister of the court, and, to a lesser extent, Pchelnikov to determine. First, however, an impresario of sorts—the machinist Karl Valts—stepped forth with the idea of privatizing the ballet. He proposed funding performances himself and pocketing two-thirds of the proceeds. Although Vsevolozhsky thought the proposal “beneficial” (given how little the ballet earned compared to the opera, even Russian opera), he fretted over the Imperial Theaters “entering into these type of transactions with its employees.”33 The proposal, which recalled the era of Michael Maddox, was declined.
The Bolshoi Ballet lost much of its “autonomy” in the shake-up, ballet historian Yuriy Bakhrushin notes, but at least it carried on. “Fortunately,” he adds, “the ‘reform’ did not affect the Moscow ballet school, which continued operating as before.”35 Indeed, for Vsevolozhsky, the school was sacrosanct. Setting aside 7,000 rubles for “the teachers of ballet, ballroom dancing, and mime” would prevent a recurrence of the stagnation of recent decades and both replenish and revitalize the ranks.36 The students of the school were to receive proper training, be brought into contact with guest choreographers (Petipa, first and foremost), and take occasional trips to St. Petersburg to be part of the better-funded Mariyinsky Theater.
DESPITE THE TUMULT of these years, the Bolshoi managed to stage ballets of note, three of which stand out not only in their own time but also in ballet history: Le corsaire, Don Quixote, and Swan Lake. All were jumbled affairs at the start, but each has earned a place in the international repertoire thanks in large part to choreographer Marius Petipa.
He had fled to Russia in 1847 from Spain, where his tomcatting, including a tryst with a mistress of a diplomat—or perhaps the daughter of the mistress, sources are uncertain—prompted his flight to escape prosecution. Petipa had already avoided a thumping after kissing a ballerina on the cheek, only to be challenged to a duel with pistols by the envoy whose honor he had insulted. The results of the duel are recorded in his memoirs: “He shoots—a miss; and my bullet shatters his lower jawbone.”37 It was safer to chase the girls in St. Petersburg, where Petipa created one ballet for each year of his service along with incidental dances for French operas, galas for courtiers, and various divertissements. His disciples notated his important ballets in his final years, and Petipa’s own surviving sketches, etched on pads in colored pencil, illustrate his obsession with order, balance, and logic. But he also became famous for his national dances, solo variations, presentations of mime, and the celestial orbs, sunbeams, and blooming flowers represented by his corps de ballet. His fastidiousness made him prone to profane outbursts (either in French or ungrammatical Russian) when reality fell short of his vision. Underperforming dancers were sent packing in tears; opponents and those who would dare to restage his ballets were derided in his bitter memoirs as “conceited ignoramuses” with “twisted brains.”38
Petipa had his professional foes, and on one occasion was taken to French court for plagiarism. After choreographer Jules Perrot proved that a pas he had conceived for a ballet in Paris could not by chance have recurred intact in a ballet by Petipa in St. Petersburg, Petipa was declared liable and required to pay 300 francs in damages.39 The incident, an embarrassment, raises a question about the source of Petipa’s inspiration. Was his innovation sui generis, sprung fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus, as was sometimes claimed in later years? In Paris and London, he had made little impression, his choreographic work overshadowed by that of his older brother Lucien. Not until Petipa arrived at the Russian court did his star begin to shine, but that light may have been powered by purloined and plundered sources. His classicism could perhaps best be defined as ars combinatoria, a Renaissance-era term that describes an assemblage of what already exists into something new: the achievement not of invention but refashioning. Moreover, his taste in music is, in retrospect, a puzzle. Petipa had dependable but lesser-skilled in-house theatrical composers at his disposal for most of his career. Only in his seventies did he set the music of Tchaikovsky. Could he not have branched out earlier than he did? Was innocuous music in boxy rhythms easier for him to handle than great music of filigreed textures and more frequent odd-numbered counts?
Regardless, the arriviste Petipa built an empire for himself at the Mariyinsky. Tsar Alexander II and his successors indulged the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg under Petipa’s control. The school benefited: Dormitories were made more comfortable, and the sixty or so students in residence were scrubbed up and trotted off to “chapel” before their lessons.40 The ruler’s largesse funded Petipa’s ambitions. Ballets were set in Egypt and India, heaven, and the afterlife, moving beyond the exotic through the dream of the exotic and into the dream of the dream of the exotic. In The Pharaoh’s Daughter (Doch’ farona) from 1862, mummies come alive, and a parade-of-nations episode is set in the Kingdom of the Rivers. (To his credit, Petipa resisted, at least most of the time, the impulse to have his dancers move in two-dimensional profile, noting in his memoirs that “the Egyptians certainly walked as we do.”)41 His representations could be stunning. In La bayadère (1877) a winding procession through the Kingdom of the Shades features forty-eight women in white; the absence of color symbolizes death (as well as purity) in the Hindu tradition. Typical of Petipa’s backwards-forwards phraseology, each dancer steps ahead into arabesque, then retreats into cambré, then straightens and moves ahead two steps. The cambré is done with bras en courronne, the arms curved to suggest, depending on the lighting, a glowing halo around the head. It is as meltingly beautiful a dance as has ever been imagined for the art. Petipa assigned it to the Russian-born, Russian-trained dancers in his corps, as opposed to the foreigners. In his ballets, the court of St. Petersburg saw its own magnificence, its own imperial dominion.
THE BOLSHOI HAD nowhere near the budget of Petipa’s operation and no one of his skill in charge. Moscow had to endure a string of imported ballet masters, beginning with the Italian Carlo Blasis. A high-minded stickler for precision and proportion, he improved the ballet school but, as one eminent historian bluntly concludes, “added nothing significant” to the repertoire.42 His Czech and Belgian successors fared no better. The distance between Moscow and St. Petersburg only increased. Lamentably, as another historian writes, “between the retirement of Adam Glushkovsky and Félicité Hullen-Sor in 1839 and the appointment of Alexander Gorsky at the end of the century, there was no resident ballet master of distinction assigned to the Moscow ballet for long enough to improve standards, and for years at a time no permanently assigned ballet master of any kind.”43
Because the Bolshoi did not have an in-house genius, it had to work around the idea of genius by creating ballets in a more communal fashion. But when Petipa became involved with the Moscow troupe things changed. The freer collective spirit remained, and informed his thinking, but dramatic content and concept improved.
An exception was Le corsaire, which remained happily confused even in Petipa’s hands. The thinnest of plots—a tale of a handsome pirate’s love for a ravishing slave girl—serves as pretext for an ambitious, inconsistent spectacle set in a bazaar, a grotto, a pasha’s palace, an enchanted garden, the pasha’s palace again, and on the high seas. Sword fights? Of course. Magic sleep-inducing rose? The stronger the fragrance the better. Shipwreck that leaves the lovers clinging to a rock? The only way to bring down the curtain. Audiences in Moscow flocked to see Le corsaire repeatedly, in different guises, throughout the nineteenth century. The first version (starring Ekate
rina Sankovskaya) was choreographed by Marie Taglioni’s brother, Paul, in 1838; the second by Joseph Mazilier in 1856, and the third by Jules Perrot in 1858. Subsequently it was undertaken by Petipa, who presented it in four different versions, each more elaborate than the last.44 Verstovsky groused about the “jostling” and “crush” to secure tickets for the Perrot version of Le corsaire, and likewise of the profits made by the servants of nobles from the resale—the scalping—of tickets in restaurants and on Theater Square.45 But somewhere inside his intemperate self, he must have been pleased by a popular ballet done on the cheap that still had everything.
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