Bolshoi Confidential
Page 18
The rest of the novel, all but one episode from part 1 and most of part 2, is missing, and with it, the central concept. Don Quixote was written in response to the misrepresentation of Spain in chivalric books, Los libros de caballerías. As Cervantes himself remarked, the adventures that fill his masterpiece bear “only a negative relationship” to other stories of Spain “and the chivalric spirit that informs them.”58 Don Quixote parodies tales of knightly deeds by knightly men. The title character is poor, middle-aged, and insecure, defending himself with a sword and shield made of cardboard—not much of a knight at all, and doomed to endless thrashings. His heroic-sounding name, Don Quixote, is a fabrication, and he needs his addled squire to give him confidence. The trifling tale of Kitri, Basilio, and Camacho is but one plot among several, none of them plausible.
Petipa set the story as a ballet in four acts totaling eight scenes, or skits, with the penultimate one (act 3, scene 7) involving a magic garden and Don Quixote’s vision of an ideal beauty: Dulcinea. She performed a group pas with an elegant Cupid and the corps de ballet, which included eight little girls, all outfitted as dryads. Most of the rest of the dancing, including that by the peasant heroine Kitri, referenced rustic traditions. The playbill lists a muiñeira, the Spanish equivalent of a jig, a generic zingara (gypsy) dance, a jota, a couples’ dance with castanets held high, and a Spanish Rose dance, which might have been like the habanera in Georges Bizet’s gypsy-themed opera, Carmen. The Bolshoi was full for the four performances. The picadors and sword dance appealed to Moscow’s audiences, as did the laughter of the moon and the gallop performed by a lark-catcher, who snapped shut the door of the cage in time with the music. Don Quixote battled dragons, crocodiles, and a spider. There was even a performance within the performance: a puppet show, put on by the comedians of the Barcelona marketplace that Kitri calls home. Reviewers lingered on the food props—the piece of cheese swallowed by one of the clowns, the plate of soup busying a devil—and the “delight, horror, rage, and joy” etched onto the face of the dancer in the lead role, Wilhelm Vanner.59 The first performance was a benefit for Anna Sobeshchanskaya, the Bolshoi’s best dancer at the time (she had been dancing for the Imperial Theaters since 1858 and age sixteen) but not an especially enchanting one. Sobeshchanskaya reportedly lacked “fire” and “chic” in her performance as Kitri, although she succeeded in “making short skirts fashionable for ballerinas.”60
Minkus did not conduct the premiere on December 14, 1869. The task fell instead to Yuliy Gerber, who needed more time to rehearse the orchestra than Minkus had allotted. Gerber had great skills as a violinist and talent comparable to Minkus as a composer. But, being prone to attacks of nerves and even fainting spells, he was not the most able conductor, as evidenced by his rough night at the podium for a performance of The Pharaoh’s Daughter in January 1870. It elicited a howl of protest from a reader of the newspaper Russkiye vedomosti (Russian gazette), who wrote the following screed to the editor: “He doesn’t know to pace properly, fails to notice when any of the ballerinas mistake counts, and can’t coordinate their movements with the orchestra—because he stares fixedly at his score, paying absolutely no mind to the dancers’ feet. We saw for ourselves yesterday as the choreographer, Petipa, stood in the wings gesturing any which way for M. Gerber to make the orchestra under his control play accelerando and ritardando according to the character of the dances. But the gesturing went unnoticed: M. Gerber waved his baton as he liked; the orchestra performed as it liked; and the dancers jumped as they liked.”61
Yet Don Quixote somehow held together, and the general success of the bravura ballet eased Minkus’s promotion to in-house composer of the Imperial Theaters of St. Petersburg—a big step up from Moscow. There his pay doubled to 4,000 rubles, a commendable sum. He retired in 1886, when the position of house composer was abolished, with a pitiful pension well less than allotted dancers of the corps de ballet.
Petipa returned to Moscow for short stints, transferring ballet productions from the Mariyinsky to the Bolshoi, but never thinking of relocating. For an obvious reason: On September 2, 1870, Arthur Saint-Léon fell over dead at the Café de Divan in Paris, the victim of a stroke. Petipa now enjoyed total command of the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg and great influence over its poorer cousin in Moscow.
IN NOVEMBER 1871, Petipa brought Don Quixote to the St. Petersburg stage. The folk fare of the Moscow production, he decided, would not appeal to the court. Petipa also suppressed some of the slapstick, eliminating, for example, the laughing moon and the bird catcher. But the far-flung fantasies were spared. The budget for the Mariyinsky production allowed for the making of a “flying spider” by a professional sculptor, “three cacti,” and “three dragons.”62 The spider was pulled up and down by puppeteers hired for the job at about the same salary as the production’s hairdresser.
Petipa even added a fifth act for a duke and a duchess, instructing the dutiful Minkus to write new music, and an epilogue on the subject of Don Quixote’s death. The melancholic ending contradicted the original comic intention of the ballet. Petipa expanded the roster for the dream scene from twenty-eight dancers to seventy-two, including three “lines” of children.63 Bringing them to the theater required hiring four carriages and ten pairs of horses. And, crucially, he made Kitri and Dulcinea one and the same character, to be performed by a single dancer. In the dream scene, the peasant girl becomes an image of divine perfection: a classical Russian ballerina.
Petipa also decided that Don Quixote’s faithful servant, Sancho Panza, needed to enter and exit the stage on a donkey, an important character in the source novel by Cervantes, but just a prop in the ballet. This was not the first time that the Imperial Theaters got involved in donkey procurement. Back in 1853 the famous Frenchactress Mademoiselle Rachel (Élisa Félix) had administrators running around in circles trying to obtain a donkey for her. The directorate assumed that she needed it for a Christmas play, obliging her to explain to the déclassé Russians hosting her that she needed donkey milk for digestive and cosmetic purposes. Somehow, her request for the lactating jennet was granted.
The idea of costuming and putting makeup on a horse was rejected, and so a search began in earnest for a donkey strong enough to carry the bulky Sancho Panza. The quest ended in disaster. A jennet was acquired from a burlesque house by the theater stable keeper for 200 rubles a season, but the beast was much too old and jittery for show business and collapsed. A veterinarian attributed her death to brain fever, “inflammation of the meninges,” but that was a cover-up.64 The ballet itself was the cause.
Soon after the premiere of the new version of Don Quixote in St. Petersburg (a dubious success, in the opinion of the visiting Danish ballet master August Bournonville), Petipa brought the ballet back to Moscow.65 This time, the disaster with the donkey was avoided, thanks to the excessive attention brought to the matter by both the imperial court and the Moscow Imperial Theaters. The bureaucrats in charge of the new Bolshoi staging took pains to ensure that sufficient funds were allocated for a stable, oats, hay, and “treats in the form of bread.”66 The cost of bridles, training, and a minder were also taken into account. The going rate for a donkey was 40 rubles, but the kontora of the Imperial Moscow Theaters was honored to report to St. Petersburg that a male donkey, or jack, had been obtained for free from the zoo, with its keeper agreeing to ride him to and from the Bolshoi for 75 kopecks a day. The papers were signed and the ballet staged. The donkey basked in applause before retiring, after the final curtain, back to the zoo.
That was in 1873. By the end of the year, Petipa’s Don Quixote had been performed at the Bolshoi seventy-five times, the bravura feats cheered night after night. The antics onstage sometimes paled in comparison to the caprice backstage, as attested by the annual incident reports—the compilations of accidents, arrests, protests, foiled arson attempts, and strange goings-on in and around the theater, including bookkeepers being vengefully accused (by the illegal ticket sellers they had caught) of
accepting sacks of sugar as bribes. The ballerinas of the Bolshoi, like those of the Mariyinsky, were upset to be reminded of the need to shave their armpits. A popular subject in the reports is the ruckus caused in the galleries by Moscow University students, likewise fisticuffs in the orchestra, stagehands getting tangled in ropes, the children whose smelliness barred them from being hired as footmen, and the mishaps that tended to befall the supernumeraries: tripping over props, backing into lamps, and setting their tunics aflame. Sometimes, to the exasperation of the administration, the incidents interrupted performances.
The report for 1869 is especially colorful. It begins with a recurring problem: violations of the thirteen-year-old ban on smoking in the loges and parterre. The directorate of the Moscow Imperial Theaters reported that “so-called” solicitors from the Moscow regional court, together with several other officials, responded to the ban by filling the theater with acrid fumes from hand-rolled cigarettes and mauling the usher who asked them to stop. The master of the loges arrived to plead with the men, who cursed him and promised him a thrashing. The police were summoned, but they did not turn up until after the theater had emptied. The Moscow chief of police was mortified and promised that, in the future, officers would patrol the theater to ensure that smoking was confined to the side rooms. The brouhaha spoiled the December 26 performance of Don Quixote.
Confrontations occurred within the ranks as well. The previous March, the theater’s sweeper, Alexander Fyodorov, was insulted and “pushed in the chest” during an argument with the mechanic’s assistant. The sweeper took the matter to court, and, to his satisfaction, the mechanic’s assistant was jailed for a week.
Then there was the matter of the December 1 performance of Faust, which was disrupted by “a member of the lower middle classes,” Egorov Shaposhnikov, who began whistling during the first act from his seat in the third row of the balcony on the left side. He confessed to being offended by the representation of Mephistopheles, whose costume resembled that of church clerics. By whistling, he hoped superstitiously to bring misfortune to the theater for its act of sacrilege.
The funniest incident, which tickled even the sober-minded officials running the Moscow Imperial Theaters, concerned a performance of the French grand opera Robert le diable on November 4. A provincial poet, Nikolay Ogloblin, disguised himself as a “commoner,” a technician summoned to the theater to inspect the gas jets in the alcove holding the chandeliers. The guard at the backstage entrance failed to detect the ruse and unlocked the vestibule leading into the alcove. The poet carried a satchel stuffed with copies of a jingoistic ode, “The Voice of Russia.” During the Ballet of the Nuns in the third act of the opera, the pages rained down on the heads of the baffled audience. After he had emptied his bag, Ogloblin fled down the staircase between the fifth and fourth tiers into the coffee room. There he was detained, along with the inattentive, “intoxicated” guard.67 Ogloblin claimed that he had nothing against opera or the dancing nuns, but had simply hoped to bring his patriotic art to the public’s attention. He was imprisoned for hooliganism.
Opera continued to dominate the Bolshoi stage, although Russian opera struggled to find an audience while French and Italian works flourished. Ballet productions remained “a strange assortment,” according to Bournonville, but in 1874 he thought he saw the future of Russian ballet in a brief interlude. “The talented actress who played the role of the village girl lent it quiet sorrow which turns into madness,” he raved, “and ends with the death in the waves—a masterly piece of tragic interpretation.”68
SORROW, AND TRAGIC PATHOS, came to Russian ballet thanks to composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Petit bourgeois in everything besides his craft, Tchaikovsky gave to Russian ballet the death in the waves and so much more. He was a regular sort, of the usual tastes for his time, sometimes requiring the poison of alcohol to soothe the nerves, prone to complaining about the weather and his aches and pains. The tragic, flaming Romanticism attributed to his existence is less fact than fantasy, the invention of biographers who cannot countenance that a homosexual man could in fact live a positive, purposeful life full of failures and successes, illustrious in helping elevate Russian ballet to dominance.69 Tchaikovsky did not strive to become famous. Decorum instead counseled him to impose limits on himself, to remain within the comfort zone of a gentleman who preferred to be non-involved, telling absurd jokes, swapping amusing cartoons of the tsars, playing cards, but keeping his life thin and reserved. He taught counterpoint and orchestration, composed for a Moscow pyrotechnic exhibition in 1872 and for other municipal occasions, and set banal poems. He attracted the attentions of a patroness and the court, and thus, almost despite himself, found himself obliged to serve his brilliance.
The Bolshoi gave Tchaikovsky his start as a theatrical composer after his education in St. Petersburg, but his career ended up everywhere, his works appearing on all of the important stages around the world. The marvel of his music resides in the guilelessness of his basic materials: traditional two- and three-part forms, themes and variations, rising and falling scales, the major and the minor, thirds and sixths. These building blocks are essential to even his most cosmic scores, lending them their most human aspects: the grief before the disarticulation of the body, the dissolution of the spirit. When he included vernacular elements (age-old songs about hills, dales, birch trees, and the like) in his compositions, he transformed them, enriching their harmonies and dispersing melodies through the upper registers of the orchestra. Thus from the streets of the boyars’ town emerged the accompaniment to angels dancing on their toes.
In 1869, the same year Don Quixote was first staged, smoking patrons proved unrepentant, and poems fluttered through the theater, Tchaikovsky’s first opera, The Voyevoda, premiered at the Bolshoi. Like Don Quixote, it was meant to appeal to Moscow audiences. But The Voyevoda lasted just five performances, being reviled as much for the slipshod nature of the production as the insubstantial plot, about a provincial governor who steals the daughter of a merchant away from her suitor, who in turn steals her back. Tchaikovsky was embarrassed by the failure and tossed his score into the stove. Two semi-successful operas later, he accepted a commission for his first ballet. He had to be persuaded to do so by the Imperial Theaters, since composers of distinction did not, at the time, write ballet music. (That was the domain of lesser-skilled ballet specialists like Pugni and Minkus.) Tchaikovsky risked affronting his peers, since the opera lovers in his circle scorned ballet, yet the composer wanted to see if he could turn prettiness into profundity. He was also broke. “I accepted this task partly for the money,” he told composer Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, who did not express much interest in ballet, “and partly because I have long wanted to try my hand at this sort of music.”70 Tchaikovsky began by resurrecting the best tunes from The Voyevoda and recycling some music that he had improvised at the piano for a children’s party. This compilation would become the most beloved ballet of all, at the Bolshoi as in history.
Swan Lake premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in 1877 under circumstances that remain murky, owing to the loss of records about the unprecedented commission, the sources for the scenario, and the original staging. In the end, Tchaikovsky was conflicted about his achievement, writing in his diary that a performance of Swan Lake represented “a moment of absolute happiness.” In a letter to a colleague, however, he said he was “ashamed” of the score.71
There was little happy about the first staging of Swan Lake, which flopped with the reviewers, if not the public. The dances, mounted by the ballet master Wenzel Reisinger, were described as bland, boring, and, in Tchaikovsky’s opinion, wryly amusing. “Yesterday, the first rehearsal of some numbers from Act I of this ballet was held in a hall at the Theatrical School,” he wrote to his brother Modest on March 24, 1876. Although the orchestration was not finished, Tchaikovsky was keen to gauge the reaction to his music. “If you only knew how comical it was to watch the ballet master creating dances with a most serious and
profound air to the sound of one little violin. At the same time, it made one envious to watch the ballerinas and danseurs casting smiles at an imaginary audience and reveling in the easy opportunity for leaping and whirling about, thereby fulfilling their sacred duty.” Then the crucial point: “Everyone at the theater raves about my music.”72
Except Reisinger and his dancers. The choreographer fought with the score, and the premiere of the ballet was postponed from November–December 1876 to February 20, 1877, in part to give him more time to prepare his dancers, but also because Italian operas were taking up most of the rehearsal time. The onstage product failed to impress. Ports de bras looked like windmills, the lifts and bends like gymnastic exercises. A reviewer insisted that the character dances, the best part of Reisinger’s Swan Lake, must have come from other ballets, and remarked that “only a German could have mistaken the pirouettes excreted by Mlle. Karpakova as a ‘Russian’ dance.”73 Three days later, the critic for Sankt-Peterburgskiye vedomosti almost begged the Bolshoi to hire another ballet master. Weaker dances “could not be imagined,” he blustered, and thank goodness the audience “paid no heed at all to them.” He found it galling that Reisinger “presumed to have his name printed on the poster” and “took a bow before a public that had no thought or imagining of calling him to the stage. Is not this pointless waving of the legs for four hours a form of torture?”74