Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Everything except modern lighting, which had yet to be installed in the Bolshoi Theater. Cavos had exhausted the budget of the Moscow Imperial Theaters to rebuild the Bolshoi, but production standards lagged behind those of the ballet and opera houses of Europe, where lighting had long been provided by gas. Russia had developed pioneering technology for the use of gas in streetlamps and homes even before the Napoleonic War, but its implementation in the theaters of St. Petersburg and Moscow was much delayed. Cavos proposed installing gas in the Bolshoi in 1856, but his estimate was high, and the plan shelved. Le corsaire was left strangely in the dim, if not the dark.

  In 1863, Makar Shishko was hired to install gaslights at the Bolshoi, having done the same in St. Petersburg the year before. A self-made man, Shishko had come to Moscow from the provinces with just a copper in his pocket, earned an education in medical chemistry, and married a dancer in the corps de ballet. (He would marry again after her death and in his retirement, to a bride of just twenty-three.) Before becoming a gas entrepreneur, he specialized in pyrotechnics, color illuminations, and sparklers. He hoped to bring his experience to the Bolshoi and Malïy Theaters.

  Yet disputes with a French mechanic, a Russian gas engineer (Mikhaíl Arnold), and a Russian gas supplier (Pyotr Shilovsky) left Shishko sidelined. He summarized his travails in a dejected but graceful letter to the directorate of the Moscow Imperial Theaters:

  Rumors have recently reached me to the effect that several members of the gas alliance persist in their intrigues against me and, in each instance, cast me in shadow. Such a systematic campaign to paint me in black should naturally awaken indignation among all who are virtuous in thought and honest in service, especially when the fate of an entire large family, rather than just a single person, depends on that service.

  Shishko had three daughters and a son with his first wife. Each of them needed medical treatment in warm climates, hence his complaint about the “semi-official denunciations” by his enemies in the gas alliance. He was pleased that the charges of corruption leveled against him had been judged baseless, but the “sad events” still stung, and he felt obliged to ask the directorate for the “protection from accidents” accorded other artists of the theaters.46

  In the end, credit for the installation of gas lighting in the Bolshoi goes to no one and everyone, with huge sums disappearing in the process. And soon after the theater was finally equipped, a gas war erupted among vendors, each in search of a monopoly. On October 7, the gas was inexplicably extinguished at the end of a play at the Malïy Theater. That same evening, it ceased flowing during the entr’acte of a performance of the aptly titled ballet The Flame of Love, or the Salamander (Plamya lyubvi, ili Salamandra). The Bolshoi Theater was plunged into darkness, scaring its patrons, who fled the hall before sufficient lamps and candles could be lit. Again on November 20, the gas supply in the Bolshoi was mysteriously cut off. Reopening the valve that fed gas to the chandelier solved the problem, without causing concern to the audience. The eight gas regulators on the payroll of the theater were investigated after Shishko blew the whistle on them.

  Having lost the gas war, Shishko returned sadder but wiser to his duties as master of fireworks in Moscow. He remained involved in the operations of the Imperial Theaters, watching for the next big thing in theatrical mechanics in Europe, then encouraging its adoption in Moscow.

  There followed the importation of the equipment needed to direct intense flames of oxygen and hydrogen toward cylinders of quicklime, bathing the performers in limelight. In the mid-1870s, carbon-arc lamps attached to batteries came to be used in the Bolshoi Theater. Batteries began to be mass-produced during the period, spurring the invention of the strangest of gadgets, from electric pens to doorbells meant to be rung from within coffins to prevent being buried alive—replacing “breathing tubes” and a bell-ringing “line to pull” from six feet under.47 To date, the use of batteries in ballets and operas had been limited, but the machinist relied on them. Battery-produced light was eerier than that from gas, both the kind supplied to the theater from pipes and from compressed-gas containers. For more than a decade, until the late 1880s, batteries and gas operated side by side, with the batteries powering the special effects (chiefly macabre) and gas feeding everything else. The documents describing this aspect of Bolshoi operations are technical and financial, but also full of drama. Fear of progress within the court ran repeatedly up against the aggressive ambitions of foreign and Russian companies.

  When it came to the Bolshoi, the court cared much more about scrimping than splendor. Imperial finances were increasingly strained, owing to the horrendously costly defeat in the Crimean War, the horrendously costly victory in the Russo-Turkish War, and the increasingly futile effort to tamp down insurgencies and rein in the forces of chaos along the ragged borders of the empire. Even given the government’s budget problems, the ballet and opera house of St. Petersburg fared better than the Bolshoi.

  The differences between the two theaters were described in detail by Grigoriy Volkonsky, a Moscow University chemist, in a letter to an imperial official. Volkonsky, a slightly mad scientist prone to setting his lab on fire (and so roasting his beard, nose, and cheeks), had been dispatched to St. Petersburg in February of 1888 to evaluate the lighting systems at the Mariyinsky and recommend improvements at the Bolshoi. He was “struck not only by the grandness of the electric lighting as well as the effectiveness and orderliness of its operation, both during rehearsals and performances. The transitions in the theater from full illumination to near total darkness are carried out almost instantly, consistently and without irregularities.” He hoped that in the near future the Bolshoi might be given “just a part” of the Mariyinsky’s lighting equipment. Still, he had a criticism. Although the electric “tinted-glass shielded Bunsen cell lamps” employed by the theater were impressive, he wondered about their cost-effectiveness. Gas produced brighter, stronger light, and the Mariyinsky had an ample supply at low cost. Volkonsky did not, however, have a problem with the cost of the fireworks that had been designed by Shishko, for whom he had warm words.48

  The letter prompted some updates at the Bolshoi. A German firm, the V. K. Von Mekk & Co. Partnership of Oil and Petroleum Gas Lighting and Heating, sought to install its systems in Moscow at discount rates, no price gouging. The gas lighting inspector instead seems to have steered the contract for the upgrade to his friends at the Theater and Theater College Gas Lighting Company. The batteries were improved but remained problematic. They were expensive to charge and recharge. Any mishandling resulted in acid burns, and they could be embarrassingly inconsistent. Mephistopheles did not look half as frightening when the Bunsen cell shining a red light on him conked out in the middle of a performance of Charles Gounod’s opera Faust.

  The Theater and Theater College Gas Lighting Company remained in control of the Moscow Imperial Theaters until 1892, when the lighting, heating, and ventilation were again overhauled, under the direction of Bengardt Tseytshel, a merchant from the first guild of civil engineers of St. Petersburg. He was paid 325,000 rubles in three installments to obtain the necessary people and equipment to bring the Bolshoi up to date. Some of his planning was deemed “irrational,” and tempers flared about dust and dirt, radiators, recurring cracks in the brick-lined tunnel connecting the Bolshoi and the Malïy, and the water needed to cool the steam machines.49 On December 16, 1893, power demands exceeded expectations for a simultaneous performance of a play at the Malïy and an operatic double bill at the Bolshoi (Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci), causing a blackout at a clubhouse for noblemen that purchased amps from the same electric station. Holiday lighting also taxed the system. Power did not flow everywhere in the Bolshoi, and Tseyshtel had to put up with the inevitable quarrels about who truly “needed an electric current” and who could do without.50

  The transitions from coal to steam, oil to gas, and from Bunsen cells to Schuckert generators were all overseen by the Dresden-trained decorator and tec
hnician Karl Valts, a fastidious, obsessive type who was hired by the Bolshoi at the age of fifteen as a set painter and seldom left the premises thereafter, rising to the rank of chief machinist in 1869 and receiving several awards for his work. He did not exaggerate when he titled his memoirs 65 Years in the Theater. Valts learned some of what he knew from his father, Fyodor Karlovich Valts, who had begun his career as the conductor of a serf orchestra before learning theater mechanics and assisting Makar Shishko in his fireworks exhibitions. Valts Jr. had a bigger, bolder imagination than Valts Sr. and earned the nicknames “magician” and “sorcerer” for what he brought to the Bolshoi, budget permitting. He hoisted horses onto clouds colored with harsh chemicals, and irrigated gardens of tropical plants with waterfalls and fountains. Critics loved his effects but complained about the earsplitting din.

  Between productions, Valts dabbled in composition, producing a polka and a waltz. He also authored scenarios for operas and ballets, which he connived to bring to the stage through exotic, corrupt means, promising, for example, ballet masters jobs with the Bolshoi in exchange for productions of his pet projects. Valts boasted of his achievements in his memoirs, but only vaguely, leaving the reader wondering how, for example, he went about wrecking the galleon in Le corsaire, twirling the windmill in Don Quixote, and whipping up the tempest in Swan Lake.

  Of interest regarding Valts’s creativity are the recollections of Yevgeniya Kavelina, daughter of Pavel Kavelin, who oversaw the Moscow Imperial Theaters from 1872 to 1876 or so. (He appears to have hung on to his position longer than contracted.) Kavelina observed firsthand the challenges her father faced on the job and dished about the appalling behavior of noblemen—their ethical lapses, sordid liaisons, and grandiloquent sleaze. Her recollections must not have been penned for publication. Dirt is a theme, likewise excrement. She accuses the family of a state councilor of soiling the tsar’s loge; apparently, her father’s first order as head of the Bolshoi was to have the box thoroughly cleaned. Then she recounts the retirement of the opera singer “Madame Aleksandrova,” who was presented with a gift from the parterre after her swan song. The diva fainted upon opening the foul box, filled with “non-horse [human] manure.”51

  Kavelina’s account of Le corsaire is interspersed with remarks about her father’s successor, Lavrentiy Auber, whom she describes as “a nice old man, a Frenchman who had a place in our loge, always slept during the performance but woke up just in time for the intermission.” She repeats the tattle of ballerinas from the orphanage who claimed him as their father for the sake of prestige, leaving him with a “huge paternity” of a “legion of imagined children with no end.” In 1876, the same year that Auber was placed in charge of the Moscow Imperial Theaters, Kavelina’s father hosted the shah of Persia, Nasser al-Din, during his first visit to Moscow. The shah had never been abroad before, she notes, and acted like a “pure savage.” His attendants butchered sheep in his Kremlin guest suite, leaving the floor and furniture in such a shocking state that the rooms had to be renovated as soon as he departed. When the shah attended a ball, he became the talk of the town after affronting the wife of Moscow’s lieutenant governor by asking her, in broken French, “Why for you, ugly woman, the ball?”

  Kavelina escorted the shah to a Bolshoi performance of Le corsaire. It was his first time at the ballet, and he “fell into a state of indescribable ecstasy, especially after the shipwreck, when he nearly jumped out of his chair and began to bellow and wail for all the theater to hear.” The gale lessened; the hero and heroine took shelter, and the curtain came down. Impressed, the shah awarded the director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters the Persian Order of the Lion and the Sun. The ballerina Anna Sobeshchanskaya took home a shawl.

  The shipwreck scene also intrigued Kavelina, who asked her father how it had been done. He told her that Valts had relied on the talents of the poor and homeless—“street rabble,” in her blunt telling—to create the illusion. The children huddled underneath a canvas that stretched across the stage; they lay on all fours, and then flexed and unflexed on cue, causing the canvas to roil and seethe around the ship. Meanwhile the din from the equipment powering the lights evoked the howling wind. The mast of the ship snapped, and all was lost.

  OR NOT QUITE. The pirate and the slave girl survived to love again, of course, and the ballet’s run continued. Performances of Le corsaire alternated in certain seasons with the successful Don Quixote, the first ballet of its size expressly intended for Moscow. It was created by Petipa to meet the desperate need at the Bolshoi for new productions and stanch the near-constant complaints to the minister of the court about the absence of a permanent ballet master in Moscow. Talk came and went about transferring Petipa to the Bolshoi, especially in 1867, but Petipa resisted. He ended up spending large amounts of time in Moscow during the second half of 1869, even foregoing part of his contractually stipulated summer leave to be at the Bolshoi. He appears to have stayed in Moscow from July through November 1869 and used his time in residence to do something bold.

  Knowing the different tastes of audiences in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Petipa conceived two versions of Don Quixote, an act of cleverness meant to send a message to the competition—although by the time the second version premiered in St. Petersburg, there was no competition. Petipa had begun his choreographic career as second ballet master of the Imperial Theaters of St. Petersburg (the first was Arthur Saint-Léon, with whom Petipa competed for resources throughout the 1860s) but soon proved himself peerless.

  Although Petipa created Don Quixote with Moscow in mind, he turned to a trusted St. Petersburg composer, Cesare Pugni, for the music. Pugni had moved around from Milan to Paris to London during his most productive years before turning up in St. Petersburg. He lived in comfort or deprivation, depending on the state of his alcohol and gambling addictions, and although he often composed according to a formula, humming Italian opera composers like Bellini in some of his tunes, he produced some all-purpose hits, including the “Opera House Polka” of 1844. His melodies often collapsed into pedestrian gestures, but in select contexts he produced music of poignant grace, with “sunniness and innocence” being pricked by “tears.”52

  Pugni, however, was nearing the end of his self-abusive life in 1869 and could not finish the music for Don Quixote.53 The resident composer of the Bolshoi Theater, Ludwig Minkus, stepped into the breach, saving the ballet and earning distinction for himself as a result. Minkus hailed from a tiny town in Moravia and had received his musical training in Vienna, where his father, a Jewish Moravian wine merchant, had opened a restaurant. In his youth, Ludwig (also known as Aloysiu, Alois, Lois, Louis, Léon, and Luigi) worked as a violinist in several European cities, and came to Moscow by way of an Italian opera company in St. Petersburg. Minkus signed his first contract with the Bolshoi in 1862, serving as in-house composer and conductor as well as the music inspector for theaters throughout Moscow. He compensated for a receding hairline by growing a beard of old-fashioned trim, covered twinkling eyes with gold-rimmed glasses, and enjoyed cigars and the fresh butter and milk sold on the streets of Moscow. He was affable but capable of flashing a terrible temper. He slid into idle depression when overwhelmed, prompting his employees to accuse him of laziness.

  Both Pugni and Minkus approached their tasks like bakers, cutting their scores, in the words of one balletic gourmand, “like so much pendent pastry on a pie-dish, to a pre-existent shape.”54 That shape included narrative scenes, solos, duets, and group dances for the corps de ballet with musical phrases no longer than a mid-nineteenth-century dancer’s stamina could permit. The music was likewise fitted to the plot, the dancers’ feet, and even the Bolshoi Theater props. One of the prop makers had contrived tears of laughter rolling down the face of the moon, which are heard in the down-bows of the violins during one of Quixote’s mad fantasies. The overture is dreamlike, the music avoiding the beat. That changes when the curtain goes up and the dancers appear. Then, as in Pugni’s ballet scores, the beat becomes very imp
ortant.

  Owing to the suddenness of the commission, the “speed” with which Minkus was “obliged to compose the music for the new ballet Don Quixote,” he was late in finishing the score.55 Petipa seems to have had the violin rehearsal score in hand a month and a half before the scheduled premiere, but time ran out for the orchestral parts to be made. Minkus’s “continued lateness” exacerbated the financial problems at the Bolshoi. Desperate for income, the Bolshoi performed, in the interregnum, a short and sweet ballet from 1868, The Parisian Market (Parizhskiy rïnokh), which “positively” earned back the 925 rubles and 4 kopecks spent on it.56 According to a letter of November 3, 1869, from Saint-Léon, Minkus was “on the point of finishing his Don Quixote for Petipa,” but he missed the deadline and ended up “quarrelling with everyone” with his famously “beastly temper.”57 Once the furies had subsided and the Don Quixote parts had at last been prepared by an assistant, Minkus expressed pride in his score. Petipa too nodded in satisfaction.

  In setting Don Quixote, based on the novel by Cervantes, Petipa reached back to his youth as a dancer with the King’s Theater in Madrid, Spain. He filled his ballet for the Bolshoi with exciting, up-tempo Spanish dances of the kind that he had learned to perform in Madrid and that might appeal in Moscow. Petipa seems to have conceived Don Quixote in the spirit of a masque, a sixteenth-century improvised comic entertainment involving amateurs. The original version, long gone from the stage, was an admixture of slapstick and colorful exotic dances that elaborated, at heart, a mere three sentences from the source novel—the sentences that summarize the contents of part 2, chapters 19 through 21. Set in and around Barcelona, these chapters tell of the intrigue among Kitri, the daughter of a tavern owner; her beloved Basilio, a barber; and Camacho, the old but rich man whom Kitri’s overbearing father demands that she wed. Don Quixote deludes himself into thinking he can help Kitri and her lover to be together, but he ends up needing their help after he is injured in a battle with a windmill he believes to be a giant. During his convalescence, he dreams that he defeats a giant spider and enters a magic garden, where he sees his ideal woman, Dulcinea.