Prior to the grand waltz of the beginning, twenty-four peasant women were to enter the stage holding flower baskets. Twenty-four peasant men would march in holding “little batons, with ribbons of several shades at their ends; by pressing a button a large bouquet would come from the baton.”109 But Petipa needed to “see the effect” before committing to it; later he rearranged things so that the baskets and batons were held by girls and boys rather than adults. The entire stage was to be in bloom. From the galleries, the dancers composed a single flower, each one a petal; closer up, from the parterre, that flower comprised a kaleidoscope of blossoms in hues of gold and blue. Color took on more meaning as the concept developed. The outdoor springtime colors darkened in the lakeside scene as the action turned inward.
Petipa and Ivanov combined the first two acts of Swan Lake into one so the audience could gaze upon Odette and come to know her plight before the first intermission. They also heightened the contrast between the rustic coming-of-age celebration and the formal ball at the palace. Spatial and linear repetitions revealed that outside forces controlled the characters—including the force of predestination as something externally imposed rather than inherently realized. The soloists existed in a realm of their own, where time is fluid, unmeasured, and the lovers escaped into the interstices, the liminal, the elsewhere opened up by the music.
That music, however, was changed. The conductor and resident composer with the St. Petersburg Imperial Ballet, Riccardo Drigo, edited the score in accord with Petipa and Ivanov’s choreographic intentions. Tchaikovsky’s music was nipped and tucked, and three new numbers added from a set of his piano pieces. The original score was heavy with foreboding but now, in this new conception, needed to suggest hope for the lovers in the beyond.
The role of Siegfried was assigned to a middle-aged Pavel Gerdt, that of Odette/Odile to a muscular Italian import named Pierina Legnani, who had earlier starred in the partial performance of the ballet mounted for the Tchaikovsky memorial. She turned Swan Lake into a technical showcase, recycling the thirty-two fouetté turns, triple pirouettes, and rapid runs en pointe with which she had earlier, in the role of Cinderella, mesmerized the St. Petersburg public. Odile’s fouetté turns are singularly unmusical, but audiences love to clap and count along with them. Legnani made them seem effortless and fun. The teenage girls of the ballet school were inspired to imitate her, resulting in sprained ankles and knees. (Dizziness was the chief culprit: to perform fouetté turns, dancers need to “spot,” to maintain a fixed point of focus on the audience while whipping around.) Legnani held her power in check as Odette, projecting a chaste ideal apart from the fluffing and preening of the other swans. Her back was expressive, her bourrées strings of pearls. But as the brazen Odile, she challenged Petipa’s strictures and threatened protocol by performing encores (by imperial decree, three encores were the maximum permitted). Petipa did not resist, since, at the twilight of his career, his success depended on hers.
Legnani’s role may have increased, but as in Le corsaire and Don Quixote, some of the smaller character dances in Swan Lake disappeared as the art of ballet evolved. Moreover, the grand pas de deux for the principals, which resolved their amorous intrigue, was moved up so that plot, expression, and technique all reached their climax at the same time. The grand divertissement, the group masquerade, became less important as attention shifted ever more toward the soloists, who executed their own spécialités de la maison, bringing something unexpected to their roles even if it meant breaking the dramatic frame. The changes allowed Legnani to include the thirty-two fouetté turns, and other “blinding effects” of her invention, in her seduction of Siegfried. “She was riveted to the floor,” the critic Akim Volynsky enthused, “and without leaving it during her rotations she constantly faced the public with her joyfully radiant face, which showed absolutely no fatigue. According to the sense of the entire act, a she-devil is before us, who entices another woman’s fiancé into her net.”110
Legnani defined the role between 1895 and 1901, after which she retired from the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg to a villa on Lake Como. Following Legnani’s farewell benefit, the part went to the sloe-eyed Matilda Kshesinskaya, a black swan capable of extreme malice before the idea of the black swan had even been devised.
Kshesinskaya was beloved by the public for exactly that which upset Petipa: her unruliness. She was also bewitching. Tchaikovsky purportedly told her that he would write a ballet for her, and otherwise sophisticated reviewers suffered memory lapses under her spell, claiming that she invented technical feats actually devised by her predecessors. “The fouetté is the apogee of Kshesinskaya’s choreographic art,” Volynsky recalled, forgetting all about his earlier thrill at Legnani’s circus trick. He gleaned from Kshesinskaya’s movements “an inner noise and murmuring, full of thunder, full of great and subtle ideas that are transmitted to the public and ignite it with unheard-of ecstasy.”111 There was no froufrou in her art, he insisted, and “for all the imperfection of the structure of her legs,” she was “a great artistic figure of truly phenomenal power.”112 Legnani had been surpassed, at least in his eyes.
Kshesinskaya learned the alphabet of ballet with Ivanov (who loved his violin more than his pupils, she huffed) and then, as an adolescent, trained with bravura Italian dancers. She ascended through the ranks of the Imperial Theaters, frequently complaining about Petipa countermanding performance opportunities. She connived to dethrone her predecessor and rival, Legnani, and appropriated most of her repertoire, including Odette/Odile in Swan Lake. In her reminiscences, Kshesinskaya cites a critic to the effect that she had been crowned, like Legnani before her, the “prima ballerina assoluta” of the Imperial Theaters—suggesting, in her Russian balletic context, that she had gained “supreme” importance.113
This does not seem to be the case. Kshesinskaya joined the corps de ballet of the Imperial Ballet of St. Petersburg on June 1, 1890. She moved up to second then first coryphée, then from second to first dancer, and finally, on October 26, 1896, to ballerina—no prima, no assoluta. Throughout her career, exquisitely timed colds, fevers, and gastrointestinal inflammations got her out of roles she considered beneath her station. Thus she found herself accused of “interfering with the repertoire” and was forced to implore the intendant of the Imperial Theaters “not to rob me of ballets” when Legnani was hired as her replacement.114 Ultimately both Kshesinskaya and Legnani danced the greatest roles of the time, from the clever Swanilda in Coppélia to the beautiful gypsy maiden Esmeralda in the ballet of the same name (Petipa’s adaptation of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), to Sleeping Beauty and, at their technical zenith, Odette/Odile in the 1895 setting of Swan Lake.
Whereas Legnani had Petipa to indulge her whims, however, Kshesinskaya had the imperial court. She enjoyed a three-year affair with the future Tsar Nicholas II, cavorting with him in the presence of grand dukes during his premarital period of “sanctioned waywardness.”115 She gave birth to a child of noble lineage. (Her son never knew his father, but current consensus points to Grand Duke Andrey, rather than Tsar Nicholas.) Before the inevitable bitter denouement of the relationships, Kshesinskaya relished a life of outrageous lavishness that the rank-and-file dancers of the Imperial Theaters, paid just enough to live in poverty, could never imagine. She dined on caviar and pineapple, vacationed in picturesque European villages, gambled, showed up late for the start of the ballet season, received a French golden palm award and a medal from the king of Persia (the same king who lost his mind over the shipwreck scene in Le corsaire), and decorated her St. Petersburg mansion in rare stone and wood. Its neoclassical main hall was big enough to host performances; beneath it, according to farfetched rumor, a secret tunnel led from the mansion to the official residence of the tsar, the Winter Palace, on the other side of the River Neva. Kshesinskaya hoarded diamonds and emeralds, but she had particular tastes and returned those gifts from the imperial collection she considered inadequate. She patiently explained in her
reminiscences that the jewels habitually given to dancers on the day of their benefit performances lacked sparkle. She asked one of the grand dukes in her stable to raid the imperial collection for something special: “a magnificent brooch, a kind of serpent in diamonds coiled into rings and bearing in the middle a large cabochon-shaped sapphire.”116 She received it.
When told to perform in an eighteenth-century hoop skirt that she deemed unflattering, Kshesinskaya threw a temper tantrum in the offices of the Imperial Theaters. She was fined, but instead of relenting took her complaint to the tsar. The fine disappeared, the administrator responsible was reprimanded, and Kshesinskaya permitted to dance hoop-free.
The incident proved fateful for Petipa. He had built his career in St. Petersburg under Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the distinguished, long-serving intendant of the Imperial Theaters, but then had to withstand two of his successors. First came Sergey Volkonsky. He and Petipa put up with each other for the two years that Volkonsky served as intendant, from 1899 to 1901. Next to the position was Vladimir Telyakovsky, a former colonel in the Horse Guards who had been promoted from director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters to intendant in St. Petersburg. He saw in Petipa a frail relic long past the age of retirement. Petipa found himself alone and defenseless. Repertoire meetings were held without him; carriages failed to turn up at his house to take him to rehearsals. His last ballet flopped, and the one that he hoped to stage thereafter was canceled. In his diaries, Petipa blames old age for his inability to do anything about his situation. But he also blames Kshesinskaya.
She never lost her preposterous sense of entitlement—even after she had her son, her ankles swelled, and her joints began to ache. In 1904, just after turning thirty-one, she was named an “honored artist of the Imperial Theaters.”117 Two years later, the honored artist was reduced to enacting pathetic revenge on a ballerina who had been promoted above her by releasing live chickens on the stage as her rival performed.118 Only in her fifties, long past her prime, did Kshesinskaya find some measure of self-awareness. By that time, she was no longer in Russia, and the Russia she knew no longer existed. The capital had moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow, and the Bolshoi had taken the place of the Mariyinsky as the theater privileged by the government.
ON MAY 14, 1896, Nicholas II took the throne. Whereas his grandfather, Alexander II, had been named tsar at the nadir of Russia’s international standing, Nicholas assumed control of a thriving empire, rebuilt—like the Bolshoi itself—under the severely autocratic reign of Alexanders II and III. Yet Nicholas was not necessarily prepared to take power: In November 1894, his father died suddenly at age forty-nine. Nicholas was twenty-six and only recently engaged. His intimacies with Kshesinskaya were long over, at least for him. Her heart remained in grievous bondage throughout the coronation in Moscow. Less out of love than geopolitical considerations, Nicholas II had married Alix of Hesse, canonized Alexandra the Passion-Bearer a month after his father’s death. By the time of the coronation, they had already had a daughter, Olga. Empress Alexandra cared little for operas and ballets, preferring to devote her time to the church (both the Lutheran Church of her upbringing and the Russian Orthodox Church she adopted) and affairs of state. She would bear a son, Alexei, but the child suffered from a little-understood blood-clotting defect, Hemophilia B, passed down to him from his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria of England. The slightest cut could cause him to bleed to death, and, at age eight, after stumbling in a boat, he almost did. The tsarina enlisted an unwashed Siberian mystic faith healer, Grigoriy Rasputin, in hopes of curing her son. Rasputin lingered at court for years and exerted, according to historical consensus, nefarious influence over the tsar, tsarina, and affairs of state during the First World War. Though prone to exposing himself in public and debauching noblewomen, there is no basis to the tales, traded on the streets of St. Petersburg, of his sexual conquest of the tsarina (a notorious, pseudo-pornographic cartoon to this effect was published on a broadsheet); nor did he cure Alexei’s illness, of course. The mere presence of the fake monk at the court is thought to have been a catalyst for the end of autocratic rule in Russia. Monarchist assassins ensured that he himself did not live to see that end.
Kshesinskaya traveled from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1896 to dance in the gala for Tsar Nicholas II on May 17 and appear in what she termed “normal performances” at the Bolshoi Theater. The coronation festivities included, per custom, a banquet for the dignitaries and a massive outdoor feast for the people, plus concerts, fireworks, an opera, and a ballet. The audience for the gala was pompous. Men in medals, ribbons, and uniforms sat in the parterre, and their nonreaction to her performance only increased Kshesinskaya’s disquiet. “There I was, alone, torn by two conflicting feelings—my joy in sharing in the patriotic joy of all Russia,” she recalled, “and the stifled, solitary cry of my love.”119 Following the now-traditional performance of the Moscow scenes from Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar, the pièce d’occasion was Petipa’s The Pearl (Zhemchuzhina), a one-act ballet narrating the Genie of the Earth’s trip down to the ocean floor to abduct the White Pearl, the most precious, most perfect pearl of all, as an adornment for his crown. The dramatis personae also included the Russian export commodities that, in the subjugated territories of the Caucasus, abused laborers dug from the ground in dangerous conditions. (Their long shifts, miserable pay, lack of food, and premature deaths were nowhere represented in the performance.) Men danced dressed as pieces of gold, silver, bronze, and iron. The Italian Legnani took the role of the perfect pearl in a costume of flame and shell. Kshesinskaya appeared as one of the White Pearl’s less perfect sisters, the Yellow Pearl, but not before the dowager empress tried to have her removed from the program to protect the chasteness of the coronation. She had reason to intervene. The ballet concluded with “a scene of semi-nude sea nymphs and sirens, looking out languorously as they bathe before an Adonis-like Triton.” Somehow it was meant to illustrate the tsar’s love for his “flawless, irresistible” wife.120
Nicholas’s grandfather, Tsar Alexander II, had been crowned to fireworks celebrating his ascension and the opening of the newly rebuilt Bolshoi Theater. For the crowning of Nicholas, there were “hundreds of little electric lights”—emissaries from the spirit world, as Kshesinskaya imagined from her hotel room. The switch used to turn on the lights was hidden beneath a bouquet of flowers presented to the tsarina at the Kremlin Palace at sunset. It “gave a prearranged signal to the Moscow power station,” the forsaken ballerina reported, after which “the illuminations started up everywhere. I tried to go and see this, but soon had to give up, for it was impossible to find a way through the enormous crowd which had invaded the streets. But I was able to admire the main part of the illuminations on the Palace of the Kremlin.”121 Like the hundreds of foreign correspondents on the scene, Kshesinskaya perhaps sensed the strange disjunction between the modern, electrified glitter, which also included “huge illuminated fountains,” and Moscow’s “jumbled medieval landscape.” The excess was meant to ennoble the poor; hardship had never looked so good. The bedraggled commoners who queued to throw kopecks into collection plates acquired, in the opinion of Count Vladimir Lamzdorf, “an exalted halo of true dignity and majesty.”122
But then disaster: the massive but underpoliced feast for the people organized northwest of Moscow in Khodïnskoye Field resulted in the deaths of more than thirteen hundred people in a stampede to secure a souvenir enamel goblet (rumored to contain a gold coin), along with sausage, gingerbread, and beer. People stumbled into the ditches that had been dug to channel the crowds toward the booths and were crushed. Yet the great loss of life merely “darkened” the festivities surrounding the coronation, according to the tsarina’s personal valet, and did not, despite some hesitation within the tsar’s inner circle, prevent Nicholas II from attending a splendid ball that same night.123 It was a foolish decision and an ominous portent.
MOSCOW WAS A “stupid city,” “a city in name only,” and an “oversized playg
round for dogs,” complained Pavel Pchelnikov, the director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters before and after the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. He was an old-fashioned bureaucrat, the kind who would not allow performances to begin until he had taken his seat and signaled, with a certain tremor of his head or jingle of his medals, for the downbeat. His once malign neglect of the ballet grew benign as he filled his days with nonsense, prattling in official letters about everything other than his job. Pchelnikov wrote of acquiring a “two-wheeled bicycle” as a “good means of getting around for those who dislike walking,” the change of light in autumn, his wife’s flu, his daughter born out of wedlock, the shortage of seltzer water, and his pride in learning to type but his fear that overusing his Remington typewriter in his correspondence with the imperial court might insult those unready for the age of mechanical production.124 He cared about his artists to the extent that he did not want to have to deliver bad news to them—on one occasion he requested sick leave, with pay, to get out of the task—and his foot-dragging kept some of them in their jobs.125 His report on the suicide of a Bolshoi physician is beyond indifferent. (Pchelnikov had “the honor to inform” Vsevolozhsky that Alexander Zhivago, a doctor as well as a supernumerary, had “hanged himself in his apartment.”)126 Pchelnikov lauded Tchaikovsky’s operas, especially The Queen of Spades, but said little about his ballets—or even ballets in general, excluding his handwringing over the expense of bringing Italian ballerinas to Moscow. He noted Tchaikovsky’s passing as the end of an era, but shared no thoughts on what might come after.
By the time Pchelnikov semiretired in 1898, circumstances at the Bolshoi had changed for the better. The ballet was no longer in pitiful shape, no longer a victim of the financial constraints imposed by the court. The drastic cuts of the previous decade had improved the bottom line, and new investments were made. Tired, tacky décor was replaced, lighting and special effects upgraded. An invasion of Italian ballerinas had secured the financial success of Russian ballet productions at the Bolshoi while local talent was being groomed in the private theaters that had opened in Moscow. Sentiment shifted to the idea that the Bolshoi Ballet might one day become fashionable, glamorous enough for visiting dignitaries like Franz Ferdinand. The Bolshoi nurtured the dancers Lidiya Geyten, Lyubov Roslavleva, Adelina Giuri (a Milan-born, Moscow-trained dancer of “crystalline brilliance” and “flawless lines”), and Ekaterina Geltser, and would later offer up Vasiliy Tikhomirov, Mikhaíl Mordkin, and even the Ballets Russes artist Léonide Massine.127
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