The saga of the great slave-rebel also attracted Kasyan Goleyzovsky, the choreographer of the biblical parable Joseph the Beautiful. He relied on friends to outline the scenario: an expert on ancient Greek theater named Nilender Ottonovich, as well as the writer Vasiliy Yanchevetsky, who had earlier published a Spartacus novella. He entered the resulting concoction into a 1934 contest for ballets and operas on Soviet themes, but it did not receive the votes needed for a staging, even a prospective staging, at the Bolshoi. Goleyzovsky persisted with the project, nonetheless, thinking it through to the end in a precise ratio of “55% dancing and 45% pantomime.”59 He brought other cooks into the kitchen, and the bill of fare changed from Russian to Georgian as prospects for the ballet moved from Moscow to Tbilisi. The Georgian composer Tamara Vakhvakhishvili composed the music at the insistence of the ballet-obsessed Georgian communist bureaucrat Avel Enukidze. The result was beyond eclectic, bearing the influence of the Middle East, the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz, with “gongs, tambourines, rattles, horns, little bells, drone horns,” marches for the Roman legions, and a chorus tasked with making sense of it all.60 But it was not to be: Tbilisi did not have the dancers the ballet needed, and Goleyzovsky, an experimenter, lacked the political support to recruit them.
He made enough noise about his efforts to attract the attention of Nikolay Volkov, author of the scenarios for the successful Flames of Paris and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. Volkov thought that he had the clout, when he signed the contract in December of 1934, to muscle the ballet onto the Bolshoi stage by himself. The general director at the time, Mutnïkh, had other ideas and rejected the first draft. The plot needed to be thinned out, the tale simplified. There was too much moralizing and confusing behavior, and, perhaps worst of all, Volkov was acting as if he had a monopoly on the theater. The sprint to a premiere that Volkov imagined turned into a marathon as the project bounced back and forth between the Bolshoi and the Kirov for two decades. It was also handed off from one composer, the mediocre Asafyev, to another: the sought-after, overcommitted Khachaturian. Before Spartacus could be finished, Mutnïkh was purged, the Soviet Union defeated Hitler, Stalin died from a stroke, and an entire generation of dancers came and went.
The events of 1917 were much on Volkov’s mind as he started writing his scenario in 1934—both the combination of fact and fiction in the representation of the revolution to the masses and its dialectical-materialist interpretation by Marxist historians. Volkov claimed to have been inspired by Lenin, and Lenin himself claimed inspiration in the actual historical figure of Spartacus. In 1919 at Smolensk University, the instigator of the Bolshevik coup gave a speech about statehood in which he declared Spartacus “one of the most prominent heroes of one of the greatest revolts of slaves, which took place about two thousand years ago.” He professed admiration for the unlikely hero and his just cause. “For many years the seemingly omnipotent Roman Empire, which rested entirely on slavery, experienced the shocks and blows of a widespread uprising of slaves who armed and united to form a vast army under the leadership of Spartacus.”61 Thus the slave had thrown off his chains, sparking a revolution taken up again by the Bolsheviks nearly two thousand years later. Spartacus’s uprising was quashed. Lenin’s was not. Thesis and antithesis, with the ballet as synthesis.
In crafting his scenario, Volkov relied on an 1874 novel about Spartacus by Raffaello Giovagnoli. But, averse to its melodrama, he also mined a text by Plutarch of Chaeronea, The Life of Crassus, and another by Appian of Alexandria, The Civil Wars, which had likewise entered the communist canon, having been quoted by Marx and Engels. From these romantic-historical sources, the socioeconomic consideration of the Spartacus insurrection that rolled off the Soviet presses in 1936, ballet and opera projects of the recent past, and from his own imagination, Volkov blocked out a scenario in three parts: (1) Spartacus as an armor-clad gladiator in the arena, battling giants; (2) Spartacus as stripped-down leader of a revolt, commanding slaves, gladiators, and peasants against the supreme Roman commander Crassus; (3) Spartacus as hero for the ages, fighting to the death, his corpse never found. This last detail was theatrically intolerable; a funeral march would be introduced, the hero’s crucified body held aloft. His name would prove “immortal,” his feat “eternal,” and his tragic demise paradoxically “optimistic.”62 The plot stayed true to the ideal of Spartacus the insurrectionist hero, a symbol of freedom from oppression in any era—from the Russian Revolution to World War II, and even beyond to Korea and Vietnam. Volkov padded his scenario with impossible-to-choreograph historical minutiae, and Khachaturian, in composing his score, matched his music to the excessive scenario without fretting over the difficulties it might present to choreographers.
The first of these, Igor Moiseyev, tried his best. He choreographed Spartacus for the Bolshoi in 1958, lavishing huge sums on costumes and sets. Act 1, scene 2, for example, featured “a wide rectangular square surrounded by porticos. Under the canopy are a lot of shops. Here all races and tribes are presented, from Gauls to Africans. Each of the slaves wears a plate around their neck indicating their age, origin, advantages and disadvantages.”63 The arena and road scenes included allegorical dances called “The Fisherman and the Fish” and “The Wolf and the Sheep.” In act 2, scene 6, Aegina, the emperor’s lover, rises up from the bottom of a fountain—just like the ballerina in the “Water Nymph Ballet” choreographed by Balanchine for the 1938 Hollywood film The Goldwyn Follies.
And folly it was. For its excesses, which diluted the action at the center of the plot, Moiseyev’s Spartacus was removed from the repertoire of the Bolshoi after just two performances and pulled from the 1959 tour, even though it had been advertised in LIFE magazine, among other large-circulation US publications.64 “No one understood it,” Grigorovich noted with a shrug, “so it was cancelled.”65
Such also happened, he claimed, to Spartacus as choreographed by Yakobson. It was staged at the Kirov in 1956 before being revised for the Bolshoi in 1962 and brought to the United States on tour. It was even more extravagant, and even harder to understand. As Janice Ross notes in her biography of the choreographer, Yakobson drew inspiration for his version of Spartacus from the “physically kinetic” but “politically ambiguous” reliefs on the ancient Pergamon Altar (180–86 BCE), then hidden in the Hermitage museum as war booty. He hoped his ballet would incite an aesthetic rebellion against the strictures of Soviet ballet under Stalin.66 Yakobson excluded pointe shoes (as one might expect in a ballet of blood and sand), avoided blocklike, unison movements, and exposed a fair bit of flesh—all in a search for a new choreographic and expressive freedom. As Ross writes of the final farewell between Spartacus and his wife, “there is no divide between acting and dancing; all of the action is naturalistically in character.”67 Even crowd scenes were meant to depict not a mass but a gathering of individuals; the technique of “choreographic recitatives” rendered each dancer unique.68 These made the crowd scenes vibrant, but the non-imitative texture exposed Yakobson to accusations of sloppiness, because the lack of coordination could be misinterpreted as the result of hasty improvisation. Moreover, the realism pushed too far for the censors, and the sexiness of his production eclipsed the ideological message. Depictions of sordid Romans distracted from what should have been an emphasis on the struggle for freedom, whether in ancient Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, or Moscow as the Third Rome.
Yakobson had created a better ballet than Moiseyev but suffered greater and meaner abuse for it, first from peers and officials in Leningrad, then from peers and officials in Moscow, and finally, when his Spartacus went on tour in 1962, the American press. Here was the strange case of a ballet that the bureaucrats disliked, but became enough of a hot ticket, in Leningrad at least, to justify the expense of shipping it abroad.69 Pyotr Gusev, an unabashed traditionalist, was the first to excoriate Yakobson in Leningrad, though he pretended to do so with his interests at heart, out of deep collegial respect for his talent, and with greetings sent, at the end of the sixteen-
page screed, to Yakobson’s wife. “The worst part of the production,” Gusev huffed on the back of page three, was the camp scene. “This was the place to show Spartacus attracting slaves, shepherds, and peasants from everywhere around. Bonfires, dancing, the people’s joy in being freed, their pure souls. But there’s none of that, and it’s more than annoying.”70 The slave-market scene had its problems too, as did the feast scene, since Yakobson had lodged himself in the ruts of the scenario, pantomiming interpersonal quarrels and tests of loyalties instead of depicting Spartacus’s chest-beating awesomeness. Instead, Spartacus seemed “calm,” “humble,” even when told by heralds that the Romans are upon him. “His oath—‘to death!!!’—should be here, and certainly not a puppet-like battle to relieve all of the tragic significance of the moment,” Gusev added on page five.71 His lexicon of invective eventually failed, and he was left describing things he did not like as simply “stupid.” But he found the words to address the occasional rhythmic mismatches between dance and music, to deride the costumes (fewer belts and straps, please, more exposed backs), and to shove the choreographer back into the studio in hopes that, despite all of the problems, Spartacus might become for Yakobson what Romeo and Juliet became for Lavrovsky: not exactly classical, but a repertoire staple. “I do wish success and recognition for you but I’m very afraid that you’ll squander it by ending work on the ballet, deciding, good enough, it’s a success, [Party] secretaries praise it even if the critics understand nothing. Fear this!!”72
Yakobson did, in fact, fear it, and he made some changes, though never enough to satisfy Gusev and the guardians of the drambalet tradition. He had supporters, and they praised him for his “mass of extremely successful discoveries, innovations,” but, before and after the Kirov premiere, he was at the center of a storm, alienated even from his collaborators.73 He “disagreed” with Volkov’s scenario and squabbled with Khachaturian about the “score’s obvious deficiencies: its dramaturgical incompleteness.” He never said what he meant, but Yakobson seems to have been recalling the criticism directed at Khachaturian by the composers and theorists of the Union of Soviet Composers, who first heard the music in the summer of 1954, almost five years after Khachaturian signed the contract for it. His colleagues enjoyed the extravagantly ludicrous score (its author was “the Rubens of Russian music”), but felt that the music given to Spartacus needed further development. His theme evolved heroically between the first and fourth scenes into a grand hymn to freedom, but it did not change much after that, with five scenes left to go. Yakobson also complained about the “absence of integration and wholeness in the development of the action.”74 Here too he was echoing Khachaturian’s peers. After hearing the score played through on the piano, one of them said, “I can’t decide which of the scenes is the center, the one where the development of the drama is concentrated, where everything comes together.”75
He had a point, as did Yakobson. Khachaturian’s music is nothing if not a curio cabinet, or slave galley, of Romantic and Orientalist references. Swan Lake makes a guest appearance, likewise Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mlada and Scheherazade, Stravinsky’s Firebird, the dies irae funeral chant, and various thumps and melodramatic swells that come straight from Hollywood—as in, to quote one of Khachaturian’s future naysayers, “Drum, drum: Kill that guy! Violin, violin: Wrap that girl around your neck!”76 Khachaturian made some of the changes suggested by his colleagues in 1954, pruning the number of repetitions and digressions, but by 1956 considered his work on Spartacus done. He told Yakobson that he did not want a single pitch changed. Christina Ezrahi describes what happened next, based on the recollections of the choreographer’s wife. Upon learning that his score had, in fact, been severely molested, during an argument with Yakobson in the middle of Leningrad, Khachaturian flew into a rage, waving his arms in the air and “accidentally” belting Yakobson in the face. Yakobson hit him back, with more serious intent, causing a rift that, unsurprisingly, lasted “many years.”77
Street brawls aside, there were just enough compromises to leave everyone dissatisfied. The Bolshoi premiere of Yakobson’s Spartacus on April 4, 1962, disappointed the bureaucrats, floundering, according to Ezrahi, when it came to establishing “the desired balance between heroism and entertainment.”78 Too much luridness in Rome, not enough bravura on the battlefield. The New York premiere on September 12, 1962, was an embarrassment. Critic Allen Hughes, writing for the New York Times, declared the work “one of the most preposterous theatrical exercises” he had ever seen. “The fact that one of the greatest ballet companies in the world would invest so much talent, time, money, and, presumably, belief in the staging of a dull pageant is simply beyond understanding.”79 Plisetskaya was poorly cast “in a part that contains very little dancing of any kind, and none … that she does best.” The score was “in the style of Hollywood soundtracks,” the fighting (and body count onstage) excessive, the storyline opaque. The myriad failings prompted Hughes to posit a Cold War aesthetic divide: “Are we to think that Soviet and American artistic tastes are so different that this ‘Spartacus’ says something profound to the Soviet citizenry?” Indeed, in a follow-up article, Hughes concluded that although Spartacus “is not for us,” perhaps Russians “have their reasons” for liking it as “a necessary if faltering forward step of Russian dance on a winding path toward real modernism.”80 The reviewer for the Herald Tribune, Walter Terry, summed up Spartacus as “wildly extravagant” and likewise compared the ballet to a Hollywood production, with “the eye-battings, lurchings, and gesticulations of silent movies.”81 The lavish production had “out-DeMilled” the famous screen epics of Cecil B. DeMille.82 The choreography may be “silly” but offered thrills and chills. “For every fabulous leap by a Bolshoi male star or a magnificently staged sword fight, there are arm-wavings (all hail!), arm-writhings (ah, sex!), arm-foldings (oh, woe!), arm-bulgings (don’t you dare touch this virgin!)” along with “thigh-strokings (essential to any bacchanal).” So much acting and action, urged on by Khachaturian’s “silent movie stuff” score, reportedly led one member of the audience to exclaim: “Look, Ma, no dancing!” The second performance was better received thanks to the alternate cast, featuring Liepa as Spartacus.83 Terry indolently concluded that “it is all marvelous if you go for this sort of thing.”84 Even so, such gleeful mockery may have proved too much; three scheduled showings of Spartacus the week following its premiere were pulled, and the ballet would not return to the repertoire.85 Logistics offered a convenient excuse. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, Spartacus was removed owing to “the difficulties of transporting huge settings and other complicated trappings by air to the west.”86
The extreme rhetoric not only reflects Cold War tensions but also a decision, in advance of its New York run, to discredit any attempt by the Bolshoi at innovation. The Russians were allowed to keep their classics, their kings in castles, but modernism belonged to the Americans. The American critics had an agenda, and their rhetoric ended up being no less heated than Soviet-style denunciations, had they the wit to see it. Perhaps Yakobson did.
Plisetskaya admired his ballet, but she could not console Yakobson after the Herald Tribune mopped the floor with him and KGB handlers on the tour told him that he had gotten what he deserved. “Large, heavy tears dropped from his blue eyes” as he expressed his gratitude to Plisetskaya for her “brilliant” performance in the role of Spartacus’s lover, Phrygia.87 The duet she danced with Dmitri Begak (the alternate to Liepa in the part of Spartacus) was “singular,” according to Ross, in “its condensation of the flickering emotions of grief, resolve, and the anguish of parting.”88 But this description comes from a biographer who never saw the ballet; critics of the time did not recognize the achievement. Yakobson’s Spartacus would not be seen in the United States again. The Bolshoi too rejected it.
SO SPARTACUS ENDED UP in Grigorovich’s hands. It became the first ballet that he created for Moscow, and the first ballet intended to cement the relationship between the Bols
hoi Theater and the Kremlin, since it was assigned to the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, a newly built space that served, from 1962, as the Bolshoi’s second stage. Here were the classics at discount ticket prices, the public racing up the escalators between acts before the food ran out in the top-floor canteen. The palace hosted the congresses of Soviet People’s Deputies until the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the plush red chairs could hold more than five thousand delegates, ethnic Russian bureaucrats mixing with laborers, artists, and the occasional astronaut from the fifteen republics. Leonid Brezhnev would mumble through his congress keynotes, mispronouncing words even in his healthier years at the helm, but otherwise sat impassive as others lauded his titanic labors and the rightness of the communist path, as evidenced by the summer fruits and vegetables that would appear, like a Christmas miracle, in the kiosks just before the deputies came to town. The mosaic banners of the republics still grace the marble atrium of the Palace, even though the congresses and the Soviet Union are long gone. Now the place hosts ballet galas, ancient crooners, and musicals like Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
Grigorovich’s new setting, Spartacus No. 3, was to be a ballet that even a people’s deputy could understand—a ballet, Chulaki pledged, that would not replicate the mistakes of Spartacus Nos. 1 and 2. “All excess is discarded. Everything is done to highlight Spartacus’s and the rebels’ struggle against Crassus and his adherents,” the director of the Bolshoi insisted. Chulaki spoke of its ostentatious “militaristic spirit” and the modern approach to the subject. It was “not an academic re-creation of events from the far-distant cold past,” he insisted.89 Volkov’s scenario had been reduced to the barest of outlines: three acts of four scenes each with marches, battles, and fights to the finish. The sinuous monologues offer generous doses of anguish and passion. Pantomime disappears, and along with it narrative storytelling. This Spartacus is a Passion set in a world of decay. And at the end, the hero is left slung over the tops of spears.
Bolshoi Confidential Page 38