Love tended to fail; historical subjects involving merciless rebel defenders of the people did not. As he had been before the war, the Cossack leader Stepan Razin (1630–1671) remained a Soviet hero in ballets and operas. Under the tsars, he had topped the Russian equivalent of the most-wanted list, but in the Bolshoi Theater, he was imagined to be a “knight of the great Russian people,” the “poetic” embodiment of the “Day of Judgment” for the feudal boyars he battled.85 The 1939 ballet version of his adventures was performed in an amusement park before its successful premiere at the Bolshoi Theater.
Still, certain romances from the past endured—as long as the productions privileged realism. Myths, legends, and bedtime tales likewise passed muster if the content could acquire the correct political resonance. Tchaikovsky’s ballets remained in the repertoire, and even for Stalin, hardly a romantic, Swan Lake was a touchstone of Russian/Soviet ballet. The legend of him seeing it “perhaps for the thirtieth time on the eve of his stroke in 1953” seems quite farfetched, though; his taste in ballet was largely limited to The Flames of Paris.86
THE BLACK AND WHITE SWANS, Sleeping Beauty, and the Nutcracker were soon joined on the stage by a fairy-tale newcomer: Cinderella. Coming from the lower classes, Cinderella posed less of an ideological threat than did her peers. She was beaten but not broken; she lived in a dirt-filled, gruesome world while her abusers hoarded consumer goods. These material possessions attracted Cinderella until such time as her consciousness was reshaped. The prince’s too.
So the story could work. The sole problem in getting her foot into the glass slipper seemed merely practical: she needed a choreographer, and the choreographer needed music.
Prokofiev had been approached in 1940 to write a ballet for Ulanova based on the legend of the Snow Maiden, but he rejected the idea along with the dreadful scenario that came with it. When the vintage seventeenth-century fairy-tale Cinderella was proposed instead, again with Ulanova’s backing, he made it clear that he wanted to avoid a repeat of the fiasco of Romeo and Juliet. The new ballet was to be dansante, but not in the Tchaikovskian mode. He insisted that if he had to submit to composing waltzes, polkas, and variations for a traditional grand pas de deux, the musical syntax would at least be more modern, spikier, and harder-edged. The familiar pathos of the plot did not, to his musical mind, require similarly comforting, romantic music.
When Prokofiev spoke of the project in interviews for the Soviet press, however, the ventriloquist’s hand snaked up his back. His Cinderella would be a “true-life Russian maiden with true-life experiences, not the stuff of fairy tales,” he explained, though he gave his heroine music that would allow her spirit to travel anywhere in the cosmos it desired.87 In his party-line comments about true-life experiences, he had in mind Soviet films like The Shining Path (Svetlïy put’, 1940), which begins like the old fairy tale (indeed, the working title was Cinderella) but ends in a textile plant, where the heroine receives the Order of Lenin. She proves so good at her job, in fact, that she is allowed to leave it altogether for the Supreme Soviet. The film was a musical, although with a different contour from the resplendent Disney Cinderella film of 1950. Instead of “Bippity Boppity Boo,” the big number in Shining Path involves the magical manipulation, to song, of more than 150 spinning looms. The big number in Prokofiev’s ballet centers on the doomsday clock.
Prokofiev’s scenarist was the well-regarded Nikolay Volkov, who submitted an exquisite twelve-page scenario to Glavrepertkom for assessment on April 1, 1941. The censors found nothing to complain about. Volkov had, in their opinion, successfully refashioned his source material and provided the ballet master everything necessary to create a “generous mixing together of classical pantomimic principles and character dancing.”88 In his typescript, Volkov considered how the ballet should look, how the décor should represent Cinderella’s traumatic past: her mother’s death, her father’s betrayal. “She stopped, became pensive,” Volkov writes, after Cinderella appears onstage. She pulls back taffeta coverings from portraits of her mother and father and loosens her limbs to suggest getting lost in “memories of a children’s game.” The ghost of her father rushes in to conceal the portraits again. “Father, father, what have you done?” Cinderella mimes. Her mother is gone, replaced by her stepmother and the two menacing girls “peering over her shoulder.”89 The censor also praised Volkov for having collapsed together the public and the private, for having Cinderella fulfill her individual desires within a communal context.
In keeping with the fairy godmother’s paradoxical mantra that even miracles take time, Cinderella’s path to the stage was fraught. As required, Volkov recalled the evolution of the ballet in cheerful terms, outlining for readers of the newspaper of the Mariyinsky–Kirov Theater, Za sovetskoye iskusstvo (For Soviet art), his initial conception, though by the time the article came out, in 1946, it had been radically altered. The “gilded philistinism” of the stepmother’s manor and the “palace’s prim world” was to have been presented in a grotesque light; the opposing world of childhood bliss, of Cinderella’s memories, was to have faded in and out of view in warm hues. The tick-tock briskness of the climax was to have ceded to a song about the “eternal springtime of the heart.”90 Elsewhere, Volkov recalled Prokofiev devising the harmonies for that love song in his head while playing the card game solitaire on the lid of his piano.91
The collaboration ended once the war began, and the dramatic structure changed. Sight gags, which Prokofiev paired with musical pantomime, became important. In a nod to the pantheism of the rejected Snow Maiden project, the spirits of the seasons dance along with grasshoppers and dragonflies. Volkov had imagined the prince touring the world of folklore in search of the foot to fit the lost slipper. Along the way, he was to encounter “The Queen of Shaman, the Russian Swan Princess, and the fantastic Firebird.” They headed for the exits long before rehearsals began, so to speak, and were replaced by the prince scouring the globe, “from North to South, East and West,” like a heroic Soviet explorer—or even the Allied military forces themselves.92 The prince experienced Africa in a dance that never made it into the final score. During World War II, the heroine was the USSR herself, the Stalinist Motherland; her stepmother the Third Reich; and her stepsisters the countries that Hitler had occupied and turned against Russia.
Yet even as the scenario was rewritten, Prokofiev insisted that his score would not be tampered with, not a single note, and would be composed independent of the dance. This left the choreographer Vakhtang Chabukiani, a celebrated drambalet dancer at the Mariyinsky–Kirov, in the awkward position of having to show the composer what he thought he might do without having heard the music. Chabukiani marked the movements for the composer, the silence in the studio broken by the ominous ticking of a metronome.93
As war reached the USSR, composer, choreographer, and dancers were evacuated to Chabukiani’s native Tbilisi, Georgia, where their collaboration fell apart. Chabukiani took sick and petitioned to remain in place when everyone was ordered to evacuate farther from the fighting, to Perm. The upheaval left the choreography in the hands of Konstantin Sergeyev. He was the original Romeo, dancing opposite Ulanova for the premiere of Prokofiev’s first Soviet ballet, and soon becoming a dominant force as choreographer, artistic director, and pedagogue under Stalin and Khrushchev. His aesthetic never developed past his 1930s youth, and to his disciples both he and Lavrovsky defined drambalet. Sergeyev became a fossil and took out his bitterness about his calcified condition on the stars of the next generation. His career at the Mariyinsky–Kirov came to an ignominious end when Rudolf Nureyev and then Natalya Makarova defected to the West. He was blamed.
In Perm, under evacuation, rehearsals for Cinderella began in the makeshift leaky studio of the House of the Red Army. Just half of the ballet was set when the Mariyinsky–Kirov dancers returned to Leningrad in 1944. The city endured unfathomable hardship during the nearly nine-hundred-day German siege. Cut off entirely, without food, medical supplies, or even warm
winter clothing, people went insane from hunger and collapsed on the streets. Aid convoys arrived erratically over the Lake Ladoga ice road, but it was used chiefly for evacuations, and accidents were frequent. Convoys sank through the ice and soldiers drowned. The siege ended at the start of 1944, allowing evacuees to return, and with it a semblance of life. Performances in 1946 of first Swan Lake, and soon after Cinderella, symbolized the city’s resilience.
The premiere of Cinderella had happened at the Bolshoi Theater a few months earlier, on November 21, 1945. The choreography was created anew by Rostislav Zakharov, for whom Romeo and Juliet had been intended before the purges destroyed the creative team. A subdivision of the Committee on Arts Affairs, the “artistic council for theater and drama,” assessed the gauchely opulent staging at the rehearsal stage, vetting details as trifling as the toothache suffered by one of the cobblers with whom the prince interacts, and fretting about the Russian content of the visual designs, which seemed less Russian to the auditors than French. The crown worn by the prince was likewise a sticking point; it looked monastic to some, fantastic to others, but all agreed it had no place in a Russian Soviet Cinderella. Zakharov, who had just been elevated to the position of chief ballet master by the committee, made clear that he respected the richness of the classical traditions but would never allow his dances to drift into abstraction. He explained to the committee that his first task was to listen closely to the music; then fill the ballet with action; and then ensure that the dancing, including the fouetté turns he had in mind for his heroine, elucidated the central concept of triumph over adversity. The committee approved of the approach he had taken and then got down to specifics, recommending, after seeing the ballet rehearsed, the removal of one of the mazurkas and the shortening of the variations for the stepsisters.
The committee deemed Ulanova a better poetess, and better at expressing love, than Lepeshinskaya, with whom she alternated in the lead role. But neither of them was to be reproached, except by the composers on the panel, who believed that the dancers had colluded with the choreographer and strangely tin-eared conductor Yuriy Fayer to change the music. It was amplified, bolstered, the dreamlike textures eliminated, the brasses made more triumphant. With the composer himself too ill from a heart attack to protest, Shostakovich joined Khachaturian to complain about the changes in his stead. Shostakovich used the word “offensive” to describe them; Khachaturian found the instrumentation “too cumbersome,” too monumental, in certain passages.94 The Bolshoi Theater percussionist Boris Pogrebov had been tasked with the orchestration and had tried to make everything audible from the stage. But after years in the pit, his hearing might not have been the best: he replaced a flute line with three trumpets and a bass drum.
The end of the otherwise positive discussion of the ballet took a negative turn: the dramatist Nikolay Okhlopkov declared Prokofiev’s music the product of an artist of little feeling and said that Zakharov had had to depend on Ulanova to provide her own internal music to create the role of Cinderella. “There’s more music in Ulanova than in Prokofiev,” Okhlopkov emphasized. “It’s the truth so it needs to be said.” Shostakovich bristled, recalling the criticism he had received for the same lack of feeling in the forgotten ballets of his youth: “It’s not true, so you didn’t have to say it.”95
Changes to the scenario, score, and even the décor drained the magic from Cinderella. The unprincely prince, a man of the people not of the palace, finds his beloved living under his nose not far from the court. She is a real girl, salt of the earth: pure and honest and gracious, not needing heels to define her virtue. Whereas the slipper was imagined to be the tangible, visible evidence of her stunning inner beauty, in the Bolshoi production, Cinderella might as well have been dressed in fatigues for all that Charles Perrault’s footwear mattered. The ballet had become a morality play about a working-class victim who overcomes her upper-class oppressors. Soviet ballet was by that time old enough to somehow be about itself. The effort to make ballet both approachable and aspirational was embodied in the figure of Cinderella. Emphasis fell on her pureness inside and her external metamorphosis from coal dust into diamonds, with the aid of Mother Earth (the third of the three mothers who appear in the tale). She is like glass herself, gleaming but fragile, enslaved by her stepmother and, in a sense, by the worst aspects of drambalet. The stepmother lives only in pantomime; likewise the banal, lumpy stepsisters are unable to dance. Cinderella’s triumph comes in the court dances of the ballroom scene, which, in their general appeal, capture the best elements of the genre.
A spectacular command performance on December 23, arranged for two thousand foreign diplomats and hosted by Stalin’s inner circle amid negotiations over the postwar world order, secured official awards for its creators. Zakharov maintained proper Soviet humility in this, his finest hour, noting the “inspired labor” of his colleagues Lavrovsky and Sergeyev in a newspaper article, but not mentioning his own.96
HE KNEW, PERHAPS, that awards did not protect artists from censure. Indeed, they exposed them to more. So too did the ailing composer of Cinderella, who was denounced together with Khachaturian and Shostakovich in an odious 1948 Central Committee resolution, charged with subverting the precepts of socialist realism in his compositions, including even those that pre-dated the invention of socialist realism. Various works were banned, the list being generic and random enough to signal to theaters and concert spaces that nothing by Prokofiev should be performed.
Losing performances meant losing income, and Prokofiev was left near destitute, with no means to settle the interest-free loan that he had taken out from the Union of Soviet Composers for a dacha far from the political mayhem of Moscow. The Central Committee allowed him to return to the fold in 1949, contingent on evidence of his ideological reeducation in the form of musical pabulum—especially scores for or about Soviet youth. These were hard to compose, even with help from his communist-born and -bred second wife, Mira Mendelson, a librettist, and from musical assistants like Levon Atovmyan, himself a victim of the 1948 scandal. Tossed out of the union, Atovmyan needed the work as an arranger and orchestrator that Prokofiev offered to him.
In 1949, the three of them began work on a new ballet for Leonid Lavrovsky and the Bolshoi, The Tale of the Stone Flower (Skaz o kamennom tsvetke). The story was drawn from a prize-winning collection of stories native to the Ural Mountains, as collected by Pavel Bazhov and published in Russian in 1939 under the title Malakhitovaya shkatulka and, in English in 1944, as The Malachite Box. The attractively illustrated tale had already appeared on the big screen in 1947: The Tale of the Stone Flower was the first-ever Soviet movie in color, and it was deemed enough of a success, regional dialect and all, for transposition to the grand theater.
The mistress of Copper Mountain guards a cache of fabulous jewels and stones buried beneath the rugged terrain. The hero is a stonecutter, an artist-laborer obsessed with chiseling a dazzlingly lifelike flower out of malachite for his betrothed; the villain is a corrupt bailiff doomed to be swallowed up by the mountain on the mistress’s command. The symbolism might seem opaque—Mother Earth subdues the lawless outback within the dark, deep context of the mining folklore of the nineteenth-century Russian interior—but it comes down to good versus evil and, at a stretch, art versus life. Together with the wild trio of gypsies who take over the central market scene, the death of the people’s enemy would become, over time, a tremendous coup de theatre accompanied by the copper instruments of the orchestra and illuminated in glistening malachite green. In concept and realization, The Stone Flower suggests an alchemical project, with everyone involved, from its rocky start to its polished 1959 realization, seeking a magical artistic and political formula to make ballet an exciting adventure again.
The original version was anything but exciting. Ideologues imposed changes on the plot, the music, and the choreography, with the aim of pulling the ballet into the ideological center of socialist realism. Forget the hero’s love of his bride and fear of the b
ailiff who would snatch her away: the ballet needed to refer to Marx and Lenin and communism too. Lavrovsky recalled his miseries with the censors at the start of the 1950s: “Prokofiev and I brought our libretto to Glavrepertkom over and over again, endlessly, and they told us: yours is a love triangle; please make it about labor. We rewrote it fifteen times, pared the romance, making it about real life, showing labor. We put it on the stage. But during this time attitudes began to change, and even our own interpretation of the subject. And they said: we don’t need this.”97 There followed the familiar complaints about the music from the artistic and political council: it was bleak; it lacked emotion; the rhythms tripped up the dancers. To help get the notes into their feet, Lavrovsky added eight-measure repeats and removed trickier sixteen-measure extensions. Actually, however, the dancers praised the score for sounding so much like Tchaikovsky. Prokofiev took solace in not being likened to Minkus.
The Union of Soviet Composers harassed him about the music, repeatedly sending him back to the piano to reorder and reshape. He recycled children’s pieces and folksong settings into his revisions. Lavrovsky arranged for the Bolshoi’s concertmaster to improvise some examples of gypsy music at the composer’s own piano, to convey a sense of the sound they wanted—an insult Prokofiev could not bear.
Prokofiev died of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 5, 1953, the same evening, at perhaps the same hour, as Stalin. The coincidence chilled the hearts of those who cared about him. The news about Stalin shook the world.
The wayward son of a drunk and a washerwoman, Stalin had fought his way up through the ranks of a political crime syndicate to command a significant share of the globe. But he had been unable to shape the world as he desired, and in his paranoid old age, when even the suggestion that he replace his stump of a toothbrush seemed suspicious, he appeared less frequently in public, preferring the celluloid company of Charlie Chaplin, John Wayne, and the stars of American film. He suffered a massive heart attack with his daughter, Svetlana, at his side, in a fortified dacha guarded by three hundred officers. “The death agony was horrible,” Svetlana recalled. “He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed the very last moment, he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry, and full of the fear of death.”98
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