Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Another dancer, Lidiya Geyten, was offered the role. A grayeyed brunette, Geyten possessed enchanting mannerisms and a filigreed technique. Petipa acknowledged her talent by assigning her a role in Don Quixote when she was but twelve years old. In 1874, she joined the Bolshoi as first dancer after graduating from its school. Two years later she was offered the lead role in Swan Lake. The music was not the fairy tale she wanted to dance, however, for reasons she laid out late in her career in an interview. “Tchaikovsky wrote his first ballet (Swan Lake) for me,” she claimed, “but I refused to dance in it, because [he] did not know the technical side of ballet and because it was uninteresting.”91 The composer certainly was unproven at the time, but would go on to write two other ballets for St. Petersburg, each a wonder of acoustic design: The Sleeping Beauty (1890) and The Nutcracker (1892). When Geyten heard those later scores, she changed her mind about his talents. Yet she still dismissed Tchaikovsky’s music as “unrewarding” for dancers, since he was, in her opinion, first and foremost a symphonist. (She thought the same of Alexander Glazunov, who supplied the music for the canonic Petipa ballet Raymonda, from 1898.) Geyten also proposed, insolently, that everything Tchaikovsky learned about ballet composition came from Yuliy Gerber’s ballet The Fern (Paporotnik, 1867). “Tchaikovsky took the score to his estate and mislaid it. This is why the wonderful ballet The Fern isn’t staged anymore,” she explained. There is no proof to her story, but she enjoyed telling it.92

  Third on the list behind Sobeshchanskaya and Geyten was the older, less-skilled Karpakova, who accepted the premiere of Swan Lake. She danced the lead role as a benefit, which pegged her earnings to box-office receipts, minus performance costs (artists’ fees, lighting, props, makeup, copyists, tailors, porters, carriages, gendarmerie, alcohol, and posters). Receipts for Bolshoi Ballet performances during this period were poor—often far below the cost of the production. Such was the case with Swan Lake, which cost precisely 6,792 rubles to stage, much less than the operas, but still not enough to turn a profit over the course of its run, despite a decent public reaction. The first night, Karpakova took home 1,957 rubles, which was about half of the box-office receipts.93 For the fourth performance, Sobeshchanskaya arranged to be paid in advance and took home 987 rubles. Once the novelty wore off and ticket prices were reduced, however, the box-office receipts shrank to less than 300 rubles a night. The mediocre earnings further signaled that the Moscow Imperial Theaters required financial restructuring. The Bolshoi Ballet could not be allowed to continue racking up losses.

  Critics agreed that Sobeshchanskaya danced much better than Karpakova, but, like Geyten, neither ballerina found merit in Tchaikovsky’s score. Both gave the composer headaches by demanding that he change his music. Karpakova insisted that he provide her something special for the act 3 ball scene. The composer complied, producing an up-tempo Russian dance that stayed in the ballet no longer than Karpakova did.94 Sobeshchanskaya wanted a variation of her own for the third act, but ran to Petipa, rather than Reisinger or Tchaikovsky, with her demand for the solo. Petipa agreed to choreograph a new dance for her in act 3 and asked Ludwig Minkus to compose the music.

  When Tchaikovsky discovered what was being done to his score behind his back, he saw red. He calmed himself down by composing a variation of his own for Sobeshchanskaya, with the same tempo, structure, and number of measures as Minkus’s insert, so Sobeshchanskaya could dance what she had worked out with Petipa—but to Tchaikovsky’s music. She was pleased and even asked Tchaikovsky to compose yet another variation for her. The two variations morphed into a new pas de deux for the end of act 3, one that Sobeshchanskaya had willed into being, and one that she danced with her husband as Siegfried. For a while, it replaced the pas de six of act 3. Later, the pas de deux found its way into Le corsair, and the pas de six was restored. There were further changes to Swan Lake, more demands. Even Tchaikovsky could not keep track of them.

  That the ballet was performed thirty-nine times in the first six seasons at the Bolshoi is less revealing than the fact that box-office receipts dwindled for the twenty-seven performances in the first two seasons, after which Reisinger was dismissed from the Bolshoi. Hansen replaced him, and the ballet was reworked for productions in 1880–81 and 1882–83. The second run ended when the sets began falling apart, and the Moscow Imperial Theaters lacked the funds for repairs. “It’s all so pale and depressing,” Tchaikovsky’s patroness complained, seconding the critics. Still she thought the music “a delight,” but the reviewers of the 1877 Bolshoi premiere considered it otherwise.95 Like the décor and like the dance, the music came across as uninflected, devoid of contrast. It did not help that, for the premiere, there were “just two rehearsals” with the “imprecise” orchestra.96 The conductor overindulged Tchaikovsky’s penchant for bombast, and the principal violinist hacked at his solo while letting the string section disintegrate.

  Such was the sentiment expressed in the newspaper Russkiye vedomosti and, in better detail, Sovremennïye izvestiya (Current news), whose theater writer made it clear that, in his opinion, ballet was a despicable art. It appealed to children and to lechers—the “distinguished bald-pated devotees of youth, beauty, and … various risqué pictures.”97 The serious theatergoing public preferred the plays staged in the Malïy Theater, which was the one venue for the arts that another newspaper in town, Moskovskiye vedomosti, thought deserving of attention. Street fairs received greater coverage than the ballet, and notices of performances at the Bolshoi appeared alongside curious advertisements from, for example, a seller of dwarf animals, goldfish, and turtles imported from America, and a clockmaker seeking (inexplicably) to purchase a female elk.

  The critic for Sovremennïye izvestiya began with the plot of Swan Lake, then turned to the music, skipped past the dance, and concluded with the décor. He expressed bewilderment that the Bolshoi had commissioned Tchaikovsky to write music for a ballet based on a “ponderous,” “content-free” German fairy tale as opposed to something from a Russian source. There was too much water, for one thing, and the prince’s love for a swan with a crown on her head was absurd. Most of the plot followed the rules of ballet, though not, to his surprise, the end. The thunder and lightning and drowning of the prince and swan princesses was “sad, indeed remarkably so, because ballets tend to end to everyone’s satisfaction”—that is, merrily. Knowing little if anything about choreography, the reviewer reduced Reisinger’s contribution to Swan Lake to a single sentence: “There were dances with and without flowers, and dances with and without ribbons.” Later he added that “the character dances needed more character.” He had little praise for the orchestra: “There was a nice violin solo, but it was spoiled by M. Gerber. How is that an instrument, and that a soloist? Dragging an unoiled carriage across the stage would have afforded greater pleasure. M. Gerber’s creaking spoiled the pleasant impression produced by Mlle. Eichenwald’s harp playing.” The judgment is harsh, a far cry from the perfumed politeness of theater reviews of the past, before Tsar Alexander II allowed for greater freedom of expression in the press.98 The invective was tempered only at the end, with the reluctant admission that, despite all its flaws, “the ballet was a success and the public liked it.” Tchaikovsky bowed shyly, and Karpakova received “a basket of flowers in the shape of a swan.”

  The budget was spent on the climactic tempest, as cleverly designed by Valts. In his memoirs, he congratulated himself, deservedly, for making the lake of tears “overflow its banks to flood the entire stage; on Tchaikovsky’s insistence I created a true-to-life wind storm; branches and twigs snapped from the trees into the water to be carried along the waves.” Odette and Siegfried bob at the back of the stage. At daybreak, the damaged trees become “illuminated by the rays of the rising sun.”99 Observers confirmed his description and, despite scorning the overall production, praised Valts’s special effects, including the mechanical construction that allowed wooden swans to swim. He relied on some old tricks, like explosives, as well as the new technology
of battery-powered carbon-arc lamps. Valts employed colored electric lighting for Odette’s first appearance in act 2 and the famous storm scene. The innovative lighting proved more successful than the wind and wave machines, which drowned out the music, even though, according to the critic for Russkiye vedomosti, this was the scene to which Tchaikovsky paid the most attention. For a composer of operas and symphonies to be involved in ballet was unusual, even radical, and the critic was eager to hear the result. But he could not: The score had several wonderful moments, but was “perhaps too good for ballet” and, unfortunately, swallowed up at the end, “owing to the routine, absurd custom of accompanying any fire, flood, etc., on our stage with noise and din such that you would think that you were present at a large artillery drill or gunpowder explosion.”100

  The fad for amazing weather eventually subsided. Future versions of the ballet would avoid the storm scene. Odette and Siegfried perish, but their spirits endure as love eternal. The famous swan theme, the B-minor emblem of tragic desire, brings down the curtain as the lovers are seen, in most representations, moving along the surface of the lake.

  Odile has come to be known as the black swan, but she did not dress in black in these early versions, nor was she as malevolent a counter to Odette as she has since been made out to be. (The black-swan idea dates from the Second World War.)101 Odile was, however, meant to be an enigma. The poster for the 1877 premiere assigns Karpakova the role of Odette but does not give the name of the performer of Odile. In its place there is just an ellipsis—three dots. The dancer in the role is not listed, even though the names of dancers in all of the other parts, even the trifling ones, appear. The absence bears a certain intrigue, but it is obvious from at least one account that Karpakova (and beginning with the fourth performance, Sobeshchanskaya) appeared in both roles—at once the “good” girl and the “bad” one, the femme fatale.

  Leaving out the name of the performer in the role of Odile seems like a tease intended to keep the obsessed balletomane guessing until the middle of act 3. This is the critical juncture in the plot, when Karpakova, having offered up the naïve, sweet side of her craft as Odette, arrives on Rothbart’s arm disguised as Odile. But she did not look that much different, and no one was fooled into thinking that another dancer was putting the moves on Siegfried. The costume records for the third act have Karpakova in “tutu of maline lace, embroidered with gold stitches. Half-skirt with bodice of straw-colored satin, decorated with sequins and gilt mesh.” For the Russian dance, she wore the same-colored tutu, but “decorated with colored velvet ribbon” and with a “headpiece of different-colored satin ribbons.”102 In the familiar, Petipa-based version of the ballet, Odile seduces Siegfried (and the audience) with power, speed, and needlepoint footwork. Hard angles replace soft curves. The contrast between Odile and her alter ego is obvious en pointe. But such dazzle was not part of the original 1877 plan and, as reviewers never tired of saying, actually lay beyond Karpakova’s range. Sobeshchanskaya’s too. The principal attraction of act 3, therefore, was not Odile’s appearance but the effects. Valts plunged the stage into darkness to mark the moment Siegfried learns that he has been deceived, corrupted. When the lights come back on, Rothbart is a demon, dressed in red.

  IN 1895, TWO YEARS after Tchaikovsky’s unexpected death at his St. Petersburg residence, Petipa and his assistant, Lev Ivanov, reconceived Swan Lake. Their setting was a tribute of sorts to the composer, who, judging from a letter to Valts in 1892, had at least one more ballet score in him when he died—one that was intended for the Bolshoi.103 Tchaikovsky had not aged well: he was white-haired, yellow-teethed from tobacco, and beset by digestive troubles before he reached the half-century mark. But his service to his art had only increased over time. He suffered his creative gift but attended to it with ever-greater urgency. In the weeks leading up to his death, he showed himself in fine form, dismissing all talk of the “repulsive snub-nosed monster” of death. “I feel I shall live a long time,” he boasted.104

  That did not happen. Asiatic cholera spread through Russia in 1892. The first cases were detected around Astrakhan, on the Caspian Sea. The field hospitals that had been opened along transport routes proved ineffective, since rural types, including peasants and Old Believers, viewed urbanites—ministers, cashiers, copiers, doctors, and lawyers—with suspicion. There were antigovernment riots and bizarre stories about people dying after digging for potatoes in infected soil and putting dirty money in their mouths. According to a report prepared by a British epidemiologist, “On July 25, two peasants from Rostov-on-Don, where cholera had prevailed for nearly a month, came to the house of a peasant named S—in the village of Egorovka in order to pay him a debt. The coins were held by S—in his mouth for a considerable time … On the following day S—died from cholera.”105 The disease moved upstream along the Volga River until it reached the underperforming sewer and water systems of St. Petersburg.

  There, the homes of the ill were disinfected with lime and chlorine, but the disease could not be eradicated. It lingered for more than a year, taking the lives of ne’er-do-wells, manual laborers, rank-and-file bureaucrats, and eventually nineteenth-century Russia’s greatest composer. Cholera bacillus was even found in the pipes leading into the Winter Palace, residence of the tsar, alarming those in the upper ranks who considered themselves immune to the disease by virtue of their avoidance of untreated water, and regular intakes of camphor oil and alcohol-and-ether-based Hoffman’s Drops. Tchaikovsky did not fear the disease, even though cholera had killed his mother when he was fourteen, shattering his childhood. He contracted it by imbibing unpurified water at (it is presumed) one of the restaurants he frequented with family and friends. Loss of appetite led to headache, nausea, diarrhea, and cramps. His heart stopped. Tchaikovsky’s doctor was vilified for his flat-footedness in treating the composer with hot baths and doses of musk.

  Memorial concerts in February 1894 included a little-noticed performance of the second act of Swan Lake, after which Tchaikovsky’s brother was enlisted by the intendant of the Imperial Theaters to revise the entire scenario of the ballet. Petipa was seventy-five when he proposed staging Swan Lake in St. Petersburg, and had himself been brought low in previous years by serious illness, suffering from the skin disease pemphigus. The itching depressed him, and it persisted for years, right up to the year 1905, when rioting broke out in the streets of St. Petersburg and he could not make it to the drugstore. It cannot be said that he brought the same level of energy or imagination to Swan Lake that he had brought to The Sleeping Beauty in 1890. Petipa had also left most of the 1892 St. Petersburg staging of Tchaikovsky’s last ballet, The Nutcracker, to his amiable second in command, Ivanov. Tchaikovsky died soon after the premiere of The Nutcracker, as did Tsar Alexander III, who had doted on the composer, granting him a generous government pension and bestowing the favor of the entire Imperial Theater establishment on him. Tchaikovsky died a national icon, and his music animated Petipa at a time in his life when the choreographer might otherwise have considered retirement, thinking less about suffusing the stage with splendor and more about his second wife, children, and grandchildren. Instead, Petipa increased his dictatorial control over the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet.

  Petipa and Ivanov’s Swan Lake was performed sixteen times during the 1894–95 season, including three performances at the Bolshoi Theater. The premiere concluded the official period of mourning for Tsar Alexander III, and the three performances at the Bolshoi celebrated the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. Swan Lake survived—and has endured—thanks to the coherence, the sharpness of image and sound, that the first and second ballet masters of St. Petersburg brought to it, and because the role of Odette/Odile has been passed from one eminent ballerina to another, entering the international repertoire as an expressive and technical showcase, a star vehicle. But for that to happen, Tchaikovsky’s score had to be changed yet again, the creative script passed first from Petipa to Ivanov, who respected Petipa’s guidelines, and then from P
etipa and Ivanov to their dancers. The drama between Karpakova and Sobeshchanskaya that had shaped the Bolshoi Theater premiere of Swan Lake in 1877 would be iterated by the St. Petersburg ballerinas Pierina Legnani, whom Petipa privileged, and Matilda Kshesinskaya, a dancer for whom he had less charitable feelings, referring to her in his diaries as “spiteful” and a “nasty swine.”106

  Petipa’s régisseur, or stage manager, Nikolay Sergeyev, helped to record the basic shape of the dances using dotted arrows, small circles, and boxes atop musical notation. These materials highlight Petipa’s trademark obsession with the orderly arrangement of bodies onstage (he preferred even numbers to odd) as well as an interest in the overall look and feel of the production. The synesthesia of Le corsaire and The Sleeping Beauty infused the décor and props of his Swan Lake: The décor for the opening included “little garden seats” in the form of small red and green stepping stools.107 The Venetian guests at the ball come prepared with castanets, mandolins, and tambourines and gather around a table littered with multicolored cups and bottles. Before the end, Petipa imagined six nymphs and eight naiads frolicking alongside the swans—but crossed out the thought. Another thought, elaborated by a technician in red ink, calls for an unspecified number of owls to swoop silently across the stage behind luxuriant arches of forest green. The queen of the owls—that is, Odette’s evil stepmother—was to appear in the weeds near the front of the stage, where she eavesdrops on the passionate exchange between Siegfried and Odette.108 Rothbart, too, lurks about, comically hoping to remain unseen as the owls flit from side to side.