The music was shorn to fit the mold. Most who knew it thought the score about an hour too long. Moiseyev had encouraged Khachaturian to compress the ending, and Yakobson had tossed out the chorus and sliced through the bacchanalia, reducing the whole from some four hours long to just over three and forcing Khachaturian to appeal to the artistic council of the Bolshoi Theater to defend his music. “I wrote the crosses,” the music of the slave crucifixion, “with my blood.”90 Yet even with the cuts, the music maintained its colorfully episodic character; Khachaturian could at least recognize it, and the dancers sitting at the meeting, including Lepeshinskaya and Ulanova, found as much good as bad in Yakobson’s changes—and their concerns had more to do with the loss of pointe work and the posing that substituted for action.
When Grigorovich sat down at the piano with the dancer in the role of the rebel-slave, he decided that perhaps a tiny bit, chut’chut’, of Khachaturian’s score needed revising. Chut’-chut’ became a complete overhaul, initiated without the composer’s knowledge and using the harshest of means: Grigorovich literally tore out thick handfuls of the score, pasted over passages that he no longer needed, and scribbled in inserts. When Khachaturian heard about the evisceration of his Lenin Prize–winning masterpiece and saw the patched-together rehearsal score, he turned apoplectic. He could not appeal to Chulaki, who had staked his reputation on Grigorovich succeeding. “I have a suggestion,” the director of the Bolshoi Theater said to his colleagues on the artistic council. “Show your trust in Yuriy Nikolayevich. Based on his past accomplishments, and his bold approach to his work.” “Of course!” said a voice in the crowd.91 Grigorovich tried to ease the composer’s pain with Armenian vodka, but the fuss continued until the principal conductor of the Bolshoi Theater at the time, Gennadiy Rozhdestvensky, convinced Khachaturian to trust Grigorovich.92
Once Spartacus was in rehearsal, even more changes were made, as evidenced by the big pencil question mark scrawled on one of the blank paste-overs. Chulaki warned Khachaturian that there would be major alterations but made clear that the composer had no choice but to accept them. Still, the extent of the rearrangement was shocking: the ethnic dances performed by people of color were deracinated, used less to stereotype the captives from the Mediterranean and Middle East than to represent extreme emotional states. Other changes included moving the music for the “Requiem” from the end of the score to the second scene, under the new title “Spartacus’s monologue,” and recasting the music originally written for the gladiators’ procession as accompaniment to a sale in the slave market.
Grigorovich tried to explain his conception to the composer. The dancing would be musical, structured by repeated themes and episodes as in a fugue, but it would not be “philharmonic,” since the goal was to communicate the overarching idea of the story rather than matching each pitch in the score to a particular movement. There were general correlations between music and dance, as in the closing sections that paired compositional and choreographic climaxes. At the height of Spartacus and Phrygia’s pas de deux in the camp, Grigorovich has her leap into his arms, and Spartacus carries her by her leg accompanied by full string section and trumpet—pure Hollywood. The parade of passages nicked from other scores is matched by the parade of dances on the stage and parades of characters enacting the plot—excess that reaches a climax with the hero’s grisly martyrdom. The processions replaced the messier crowd scenes that Moiseyev and Yakobson had come up with for the ballet.
Khachaturian was unimpressed: “Where are the women?” he asked, after Grigorovich described the opening scene and the décor that Simon Virsaladze, his longtime collaborator, had devised. The curtain would rise to show a wall made out of the shields of the Roman soldiers; Crassus would stand like a statue at the top; the wall collapses; the Roman Empire is reduced to rubble. The future. Grigorovich went on to describe the second scene, featuring Spartacus’s monologue. “But where are the women?” Khachaturian asked again.93 Aegina and Phrygia turned up soon enough, with thighs exposed rather than swords drawn.
Here Grigorovich takes the low road, bypassing Eros to pursue sexual exhibitionism. “There’s no eroticism in the erotic scenes,” the ballet historian Vadim Gayevsky wrote in 1981, as part of a critique of Grigorovich’s craft that infuriated the choreographer so much that he arranged for the book, titled Divertisment (Divertissement), to disappear from print. “Proud patricians and enticing courtesans are not to be found in Grigorovich’s Rome,” a “dead city” of drunkenness without merriment. “Is this Aegina supposed to be a courtesan?” he asked. “She’s a soldier’s girl, scraped up from the bottom.”94 Gayevsky doubtless had in mind the middle of the third act, where Aegina performs a strip-club dance (for the sake of period realism, a Bacchic pinecone staff, a sexual symbol, serves as the pole). It confirms, in case her solos in the first and second acts had not, that women are objects to be ogled.
Plisetskaya danced the part in later years, but the muscles in her back flinched. “In the adagio with Crassus I had to grab my toe with my hand and pull away in attitude from my partner, who held me in counterbalance,” she protested. “The muscles of my spine were twisted like laundry being wrung out.”95 Risks aside, the part remained central to the ballet. As critic Marina Harss wrote of a 2014 performance, “Aegina shows off her legs incessantly, running her hand down a thigh, holding one leg up to her head as she turns, or, more obviously, raising her crotch like a weapon while she lies provocatively on the floor. Not much is left to the imagination.”96 Phrygia too is objectified by Grigorovich, hoisted by Spartacus above his head, then dangled downward as a submissive burden to be tossed around. The suggestiveness can be dialed up or down depending on the performer. In tamer presentations, the fate of nations is reduced—or, if the perspective is right, elevated—to the level of a marital quarrel.
The dancer in the title role, Vladimir Vasiliev, was neither gigantic nor muscle-bound, but proved such a compelling stage presence that Grigorovich made the decision, shrewd in retrospect, to reassign Liepa, Yakobson’s Spartacus, to the role of Crassus. In Grigorovich’s revision, the scenes featuring Spartacus are mirrored by those featuring Crassus, an ancient Roman leader with Imperial Russian cravings for opulence in his personal surroundings. He and Spartacus look and sometimes act the same, yet Spartacus wears rags and chains, an obvious source of resentment. Liepa had the expressive range to fill out the part of Crassus, adding fear and self-doubt to the Roman despot’s strutting sadism, while Vasiliev brought unexpected conviction to the role of Spartacus. The new hero gave Grigorovich ideas when the ballet master ran out of them. Vasiliev added tricks of his own, including his patented one-handed lift of Phrygia and turns in the air in attitude. (He benefited from the fact that his longtime partner and wife, the wonderful lyric ballerina Ekaterina Maksimova, was slight.) He also devised the choreographic equivalent of stentorian speech: he would run and leap downstage on the diagonal from right to left, pause, loop back upstage in the wings, then run and leap on the diagonal from left to right. Liepa, as Crassus, did the same thing, exhaustingly, but Vasiliev turned it into a call to arms and cri de coeur. Look, his crisscrossing seemed to say, I may not be as awesomely musclebound as you, you consider me merely irritating, but I represent the aspirations of an entire populace. Through his performance, the pianissimo presence of one became the fortissimo presence of the multitude.
Rome stagnates, Crassus feasts, Spartacus rallies his forces, there are traitors on both sides, and someone might be having an affair. The uprising threatens chaos. The audience is left to mull the dialectical relationship of subjugator and subjugated. Is insurrection worth the price? The answer is no; there is nothing subversive in the ballet, which ultimately suffers from a lack of integration between the ensemble dances and the soloists’ monologues. Grigorovich imagined the contrast between the collective and the individual in symphonic terms, but fashioned his ballets more like Baroque-era concertos, in which two or three solo instruments interact loosely between repetitio
ns of a refrain played in unison by the full ensemble. There are other musical analogies, many made disparagingly. Gayevsky, the critic Grigorovich most despised, claims that the choreographer (like the Soviet leadership) had an allergic reaction to American jazz but might have benefited from listening to it, given the stiffness of his rhythms. The ensemble dances were too “mechanical,” governed by the metronome, with each of the slaves raising one of their feet to the knee, stepping forward, and then sinking to the ground in sync. Spartacus stepped further forward, and the men and women sunk down in counterpoint, but, for Gayevsky, the “motor-like movement” made effective transitions to the poetic monologues difficult. “The procession moves, and the soul is silent,” Gayevsky lamented, evidently presuming that the soul has a rather impoverished choreographic lexicon. “The soul speaks, and the procession stops.”97
Decades later, and at a safer distance from Stalin, the Thaw, and Russia itself, Joan Acocella referred back to the crisscrossing diagonals in Spartacus to articulate what she considered to be the central problem with his method: “Practically every time Spartacus comes onstage he does so in leaps on the diagonal. Then he runs into the wings, scoots upstage, and leaps down the space on the opposite diagonal. Then his enemy Crassus comes in, leaping on the diagonal, and all you want is to go home.”98 But in Soviet Russia, home—cramped, sometimes communal prefab apartments—was not especially desirable. The dancing had broad escapist appeal for Soviet audiences, the cheap athletic thrills repeated on the other side of the scrim that descended for the first of the monologues, and the politics did not matter once the ballet was cleared for production. It entertained despite its ideological content, which was indeed something new.
Grigorovich’s Spartacus succeeded because of its iron-jawed heroics, its unabashed sexiness, and because audience members could congratulate themselves on teasing out what seemed to be a subtext, but which had been calculatedly laid out on the surface. The moral of the story is that suffering in defeat proves nobler than exulting in triumph. Such is what it meant to be a Soviet Man, and what the transformation of Spartacus into a flying machine, hurtling across the stage with limbs thrown back and heart open, was meant to represent.
MISSING FROM THE cast was Plisetskaya, who was on tour when work began on the ballet and enmeshed in a project of her own, one that, to be successful, required her to exploit her fame. In 1964, she received the Lenin Prize, performed at La Scala, and became the subject of a documentary film. The official imprimatur emboldened her to approach Shostakovich, Khachaturian, and then her own husband for a balletic treatment of Carmen. The sexual subject matter called for a woman’s legs to be wound around not a staff, but a man’s hips, along the lines of Balanchine’s 1929 ballet The Prodigal Son, which the New York City Ballet brought to Moscow in the Cold War cultural exchange of 1962. So this particular provocation had choreographic precedent. Still, to perform as Carmen, Plisetskaya had to argue her way through a thicket of nastiness involving the beautiful but unsexy minister of culture and her no less prudish aides. Carmen Suite was her cardinal obsession, and getting it onto the Bolshoi Theater stage and into the touring repertoire became the fight of her career.
The ballet is based on Georges Bizet’s opera titled for its tragic heroine. Carmen, a Spanish gypsy, has a tryst with a soldier, Don José, whom she rejects in turn for a toreador, Escamillo. Seeking revenge, Don José sticks a knife in her heart, and she perishes as crowds cheer Escamillo’s triumph in the bullring. Plisetskaya was inspired to pursue the role in 1966 after seeing Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso on tour in Moscow. The dancing of the Cubans was a revelation—“Spanish” without the clichés of Spanish character dancing, performed en pointe in a non-classical manner. Their visit was part of an international cultural exchange prompted by the increasingly friendly relationship between the Soviet Union and Cuba after the socialist revolution in 1959, led by Fidel Castro, and the establishment of communist rule in 1965. There followed a dialogue between the Bolshoi Theater and the Ministry of Culture concerning the possible participation of Plisetskaya, along with Maximova and Vasiliev, in the international dance festivals in Havana in 1966 and 1967.99 The retired Ulanova was invited along as a guest. Nothing came of the invitations in 1966, and the trip in 1967 also proved impossible to arrange: Maximova and Vasiliev had committed to Spartacus, Ulanova was ambivalent, and Plisetskaya was scheduled to be in Czechoslovakia, another important front in the cultural Cold War.
To mark Moscow and Havana’s alliance, Alonso was invited to serve as a resident choreographer at the Bolshoi from December 17, 1966, to May 4, 1967.100 When Plisetskaya pitched Carmen to Alonso, he immediately said “Da!” and received 1,082 rubles to create Carmen Suite.101 He became the first choreographer to create a ballet specifically for the ballerina, exploiting the physical intensity that so exceeded that of the other dancers, female and male, in the troupe. Left unsaid was the fact that the choreographer’s sister was prima ballerina assoluta of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. She also took to the idea of Carmen, and she had the perfect dark eyes and copper skin for the role. Thus the Moscow premiere starring Plisetskaya would be followed by the Havana premiere starring Alicia Alonso.
In realizing Carmen’s tale of seduction and betrayal, Plisetskaya drew on the real sexual tension between her and the male dancers at the Bolshoi. She taught classes for men that demanded “far more sheer physical output” than those for women.102 The segregation also served her artistic purposes. She did not want to dilute the testosterone-fueled atmosphere by adding other women to the mix. The physical intensity was superabundant in Carmen Suite—and controversial. Ekaterina Furtseva, the minister of culture, approved the project believing that it would be a one-act version of Don Quixote or Laurencia or perhaps an audience-pleasing admixture of both. After the first performance at the Bolshoi Theater on April 20, 1967, however, Furtseva and the inspectors from the other Soviet agencies involved in the arts complained that the ballet was trafficking in “smoldering emotion and Latin sexual appetites.”103 She ordered Plisetskaya to cover up for the second performance of Carmen Suite and demanded that the erotic adagio, wherein, thighs exposed, she coiled herself around Don José and kissed him hungrily, be cut. Had the order been refused, The Nutcracker would have been performed in its place. Plisetskaya would never forget Furtseva’s unlettered declaration that she and her collaborators had “turned a heroine of the Spanish people into a whore.”104 Rodion Shchedrin, who assembled the score from a montage of melodies taken from Bizet’s opera, was accused of plagiarism.
Later, Furtseva stepped in to prevent Carmen Suite from being performed in Montreal as part of Expo 67, a half-year-long international exhibition that marked Canada’s bicentennial. More than 50 million people paid the $2.50 entrance fee. Along with Swan Lake, the Red Army Chorus, and a Ukrainian folk ensemble, Carmen Suite was to have been part of an elaborate Soviet demonstration of achievements in culture, engineering, and science. Interested in space? Come into the Soviet pavilion to experience the simulated moon trip! Never tried caviar? Eight tons have been shipped! Even during this period of detente, however, a relaxing of the intense international arms race, Furtseva did not ease up on Plisetskaya. Chulaki recalled the minister of culture scrambling to block the sets and costumes of Carmen Suite from being shipped overseas out of Leningrad.
It became clear to me that Furtseva’s nervousness stemmed from the fact that she had been asked to explain just why Carmen Suite had been included in the USA tour [sic, Expo 67]. As was her habit, she blamed it all on the willfulness of the theater’s administration. And it was of no use saying that the repertoire for the tour had been set long before the criticism, and that no official or “permanent member” [of the Central Committee] had contested the decision-making process for the American tour. None of my arguments were accepted by the exasperated Minister. She demanded that the sets of Carmen Suite not be sent to Leningrad! I answered that they’d already been sent. Then she ordered that they not be loaded onto the ca
rgo ship! I told her that they’d been loaded some time ago. Then she ordered that they be unloaded from the ship at the dock! I reported that the ship had already left the port. Then she said that the ship had to be detained in the open sea (!) and the sets transferred onto whatever vessel was available (a tugboat?) and brought back to port!
Obviously she couldn’t wait to report to those “higher up” that all measures had been taken to prevent the undesirable Carmen Suite from touring to America.
When I firmly stated that the operation she proposed was completely unrealistic, she raged and raged, and only calmed down somewhat when I assured her that the sets would not be unloaded at the port of arrival, but would be separated out and put in the brig, returning unused to the USSR.105
Furtseva did not appreciate Chulaki’s condescending tone. He was an imposing, bald-headed, bespectacled bear of a man, but she was the boss. After the sets of Carmen Suite returned to the USSR unused, Chulaki was fired.
Nevertheless, Carmen Suite returned to the Bolshoi Theater stage. The chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Alexei Kosïgin, took in a performance and, by saying he liked it, instantly turned it into a Soviet classic. Thereafter Furtseva was required to sing its praises just as loudly as she had raged against its flaws on the telephone to Chulaki, and Plisetskaya would coil her legs even more tightly around Fadeyechev as Don José. She no longer brooked any criticism of the concept behind the ballet or her performance. She jettisoned friends who considered the dancing too piquant and disparaged critics outside of Russia who thought it, to the contrary, not heated enough—a sincere effort to sexually liberate Soviet ballet, perhaps, but still a Soviet ballet. The Bolshoi was “five minutes short of becoming a museum,” in her opinion, and so she dismissed the suggestion that what she considered brazenly sultry could not compete with the offerings on Broadway.106 To that end, she eventually performed her “good-bad” ballet as part of a “Stars of the Bolshoi Ballet” gala in New York. “Flaunting and grinning,” she was “vividly feline” and, like the other members of the cast, “larger than life,” a law unto herself. 107
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