Bolshoi Confidential

by Simon Morrison

  Grigorovich’s ballets lost their Cold War sheen, however, and the new political imperative of openness left the choreographer facing tough questions, during a subsequent North American tour, about Plisetskaya’s, Vasiliev’s, and Maksimova’s invective against him and the loss of morale in general at the Bolshoi. In July of 1990, the New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff put his feet to the fire by asking about a one-day hunger strike the previous month. “Yes, everything is going downhill,” Grigorovich acknowledged. “What is happening in the theater reflects what is happening in the entire country.”163

  In August of 1991, there followed a failed coup d’état and a showing of Swan Lake on state television. Plisetskaya had danced in Grigorovich’s version of the ballet for the first time on April 18, 1970. Her performance was recorded, and from then on, it was broadcast during holidays and after the deaths of Soviet leaders. To turn on the television and see Plisetskaya in Grigorovich’s Swan Lake meant something big was happening.

  The ballet was shown repeatedly on every channel as tanks rolled into Moscow on Monday, August 19. The coup attempt, led by Gennadiy Yanayev, was organized against Gorbachev by the KGB and Communist Party hardliners who were threatened by his liberal policies. Boris Yeltsin, the reform-minded, recently elected president of the RSFSR, stood on a tank in the rain to protest the putsch in front of the Russian parliament building. If the coup succeeded, he knew, one of the quarter million pairs of handcuffs that had been sent to Moscow from a factory in Pskov would be on his wrists. That did not happen. The coup was a botch, the plotters inept and inebriated, and it unraveled before the rain ended, hastening the event that the plotters feared the most: the curtain coming down on the Soviet Union, the exposure of all the corruption, lies, and repressions that had held it together for seven decades.

  The successful putsch of 1917 did not have a sequel. Yeltsin, who fashioned himself a populist strongman, defeated the trembling Yanayev in a battle of wills; Gorbachev was released from house arrest in the Crimea; soldiers returned to their bases. The clouds cleared, and the sun rose over the motherland, just as it does at the end of Swan Lake, which some older Russians find hard to watch nowadays, owing to its unpleasant associations with these events.

  The Soviet Union had officially collapsed, and Russia had not yet recovered as a functional state. With no cash on hand, the Bolshoi had become a sagging, buckling firetrap, and what appeared onstage seemed just as dilapidated. Grigorovich’s dispiriting production of Don Quixote comprised a handful of recycled steps, devoid of caprice. Those dancers who had not found work abroad wanted contracts and an end to the political favoritism that promoted lesser talents over greater ones; serfdom had long been abolished, except, it was said, at the Bolshoi and in the labor camps. The general director at the time, Vladimir Kokonin, recognized the need for changes and agitated for the naming of a board of directors. Grigorovich resigned in response to threatened strikes, but not before prodding his supporters to organize a strike of their own. On March 10, 1995, the dancers refused to take the stage—something that had never happened before—and forced the cancellation of a performance of Romeo and Juliet. The surviving communist newspapers, voices of doom in the 1990s, excoriated the striking dancers, one-quarter of the cast, for stripping Russia of its cultural pride. Izvestiya published a chronicle of the events that had “pushed the Bolshoi to the edge of the precipice.” The predicted collapse would be “a crime against Russian culture.”164 Forced out under a cloud, Grigorovich remains on the books as the sole ballet master of the theater.

  A series of artistic directors took the helm during the 1990s, their tenures all undistinguished save for that of Alexei Ratmansky, who mounted new productions on other stages during the protracted renovations to the theater. Having been announced in 1987, the New Stage finally opened on November 29, 2002, replacing a run-down set of apartment buildings on the site. Alexander Gorsky had lived in one of those apartments; all that is left of it now is a memorial plaque. The restoration, indeed resuscitation, of the Bolshoi began just under three years later, at the urging of Dmitri Medvedev, the stand-in Russian president between the first and second Putin administrations. Grigorovich was not involved in the massive repair. Ratmansky is at present the most fecund and most in-demand choreographer in the world, but he quit the Bolshoi in 2008. He now lives and works eight time zones away in New York City.

  GRIGOROVICH NOW SPENDS much of his time in his dacha, imported cognac on the table when his Georgian housekeeper permits, relaxed in jeans and plaid flannel shirts. Photographs and posters from productions of his ballets around the world line the staircases and the landings, along with models of stage sets and a miniature regimental costume once worn by Marius Petipa. There is less from the Bolshoi than one would expect from his decades in charge, the spectacles of power displaced by charming drawings of children in foreign performances of his Nutcracker. His home is a shrine—not to his career but to the life of ballerina Natalya Bessmertnova, his muse and his second wife. She died of cancer in 2008; a replica of her headstone hangs in his sitting room. She enriched the roles he created for women, staying truest to her temperament as Giselle, the role that defined her career. In Ivan the Terrible, she assumed the haunted and haunting look of a Byzantine icon, but she also possessed great acrobatic skill, blazing across the stage at the end of The Golden Age. Grigorovich may have fashioned tendentious ballets at the expense of the Romantic tradition, but his ivory-skinned, raven-haired leading lady recalled the Russian imperial era of Ekaterina Sankovskaya.

  His Spartacus continues to be performed in Moscow and abroad, an artifact of a time when Marxist-Leninist dogma tried to disguise itself as dance. For highbrow ballet devotees, it is more like a dinosaur that somehow survived the end of the Mesozoic Soviet Union. Grigorovich’s Legend of Love returned to the Bolshoi in 2014, the silver jubilee of its Moscow premiere. And for the 2012–13 season, Ivan the Terrible was revived after a twenty-two-year hiatus. In the opinion of the reviewer for the business newspaper Kommersant, it should have been marketed exclusively to tourists as a “souvenir” of “Russian-Soviet exoticism,” together with Russian nesting dolls, fur hats with hammer and sickle pins, vodka, and dark chocolates wrapped in pictures of the Kremlin steeples.165 The run of Ivan the Terrible ended in disaster, however, when the dancer in the lead role, Pavel Dmitrichenko, was arrested on suspicion of planning the attack on artistic director Sergey Filin. The perfect villain in life and in art, he spent three years in prison. Folklore has the real Ivan the Terrible putting out the eyes of the architects of Saint Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square in the sixteenth century to ensure that they never built anything as beautiful ever again. There is no factual record of such a horror, but Dmitrichenko and his accomplices, as the world learned in 2013, almost blinded Filin.

  Grigorovich had no public comment about the scandal. Nothing of the sort happened on his watch, for he alone meted out the punishments, and the jealous, obsessive, sadomasochistic world of Russian ballet was less known (and, excluding Plisetskaya, less glamorized) than the jealous, obsessive, sadomasochistic worlds of British and American ballet. Under his rule, the theater functioned reliably even as such control choked the life from the creative process. The freedom he offered his dancers was the freedom of little choice, and Plisetskaya balked, making it clear in her performances that there is a difference between dancing and being told to dance. She felt in charge of herself, but the institution—and the communist regime—insisted otherwise.

  Tatyana Kuznetsova laid bare the realities of the age of Grigorovich in a tough-minded book translated, in English, as Chronicles of the Bolshoi Ballet. In Russian, the title has a second meaning that suggests chronic illness. Plisetskaya provided the foreword to the text, which dispatches four of the “myths” of Grigorovich’s leadership of the theater, the first being that he had rescued it as a Soviet institution, observing that the most frequently performed Soviet ballet, The Red Poppy, and the most beloved, Romeo and Juliet, came from
other choreographers. The success of the Bolshoi as a touring organization is also questioned, since the most famous tour—to London in 1956—pre-dated his tenure. His purported “charisma” is undercut by references to his coarse dressing down of his dancers, likewise his failure to nurture talent. In erasing the past, he left behind a power vacuum; thus even the fighting over contracts that followed his resignation is placed at his feet.166 There is, however, context for her protracted complaint that goes beyond Grigorovich’s dictatorial style. Kuznetsova settles her scores as a journalist and as a former character dancer with the Moiseyev folk ensemble. Her father and grandfather had also been character dancers, the latter repressed under Stalin, and her mother danced alongside Plisetskaya. She sees a different past from the one Grigorovich defends, bathed in sentiment, as the stable alternative to the unstable present. He is approachable, convivial, and garrulous on good days, still talking about Master and Margarita, but unreachable on others. After the death of his antipode, Plisetskaya, on May 2, 2015, he closed the door on reporters, and on his assistants, to be with his thoughts.

  Maya Plisetskaya died at home with her husband in their apartment near the ballet and opera house in Munich. Shchedrin organized a private funeral for his wife of fifty-seven years; the Bolshoi Theater observed a minute of silence and recast the planned celebration of her ninetieth birthday on November 20, 2015, as a memorial tribute. Russia and the Bolshoi gave her the will to overcome all constraints by imposing so many on her. And so she would be truly free, if only at the end. Her last wish was to have her ashes scattered, from high in the air, over her homeland.

  EPILOGUE

  THE GALA CELEBRATION of the $680 million–plus restoration of the Bolshoi on October 28, 2011, marked a reinvention and reimagining of the theater. Work lasted six years—the last one busier on-site than the other five combined—and spanned the terms of two Russian presidents, Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev. When the Bolshoi reopened, the new Russian noble class basked in the stunning achievement of its largesse, never mind the resignations of people overseeing it (including the former mayor of Moscow, Yuriy Luzhkov) and the budget overruns. The fractiousness did not matter to those posing before the state media cameras at the gala. As Yuliya Bedyorova reported in a smart piece for Moskovskiye novosti (Moscow news) titled “Zerkalo parada” (The gala mirrored), the parliamentarians and show-business types in attendance seemed more interested in actress Monica Bellucci’s gown than the historically accurate compound of ochre, umber, clay, and lime coating the new façade.1 The culture channel tallied the glitterati in attendance, including Plisetskaya and Vishnevskaya, who sat in prominent boxes on opposite sides of the theater.

  In the run-up to the gala, the federal agency in charge of the restoration dazzled journalists with exotic tales of miracle-working artisans. The craftsmanship was impressive, from first tier to sixth. De-mineralizing the limestone columns of the entrance had wiped away a century of city grime to uncover a matte, milky-white surface. The theater issued an account of the project chock-full of staggering statistics: 2,812 sheets of gold leaf were applied across the auditorium; 24,000 pieces of crystal were polished, refashioned, and rehung in the chandelier. The result is meant to stun, and it does. As Alastair Macaulay concluded in the New York Times, the new-old Bolshoi “may well now be the world’s most splendid theater.”2

  No wonder the director of the high-pressure gala, Dmitri Chernyakov, chose to stage the Bolshoi itself by showcasing the process of the renovation along with its product. The curtain opened to reveal a noisy, dusty construction scene. Slowly workers gathered at the proscenium to form a chorus and sing the anthem “Be Glorious, Russia!” (Slav’sya, Rossiya!) to onstage brass accompaniment and the pealing of Orthodox bells. For those keeping score, no fewer than six works by Tchaikovsky were performed. Next in line came Prokofiev and Glinka, with two each. Medvedev, president of the Russian Federation at the time, applauded politely throughout, except after Natalie Dessay sang Rachmaninoff’s setting of Pushkin’s lyric “Sing Not, My Beauty” (Ne poy, krasavitsa). The song was affectingly performed, but the text refers to Georgia, whose government, like that of Ukraine, has not been a friend to Russia of late.

  Invitations to the gala came from the Kremlin, though some purportedly appeared for sale online for 2,000,000 rubles ($66,500). Not everyone associated with the theater was invited. Before his retirement and relocation to St. Petersburg for the directorship of the Vaganova Ballet Academy, the dancer Nikolay Tsiskaridze complained a little too loudly about the low ceilings in the rehearsal studios. He was struck from the guest list.

  A few days later, on November 2, conductor Vladimir Jurowski took the podium for the official opening of the regular season. For years everyone assumed that Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar would be picked for this epochal evening; it is the Russian opera, having been blessed by nationalist ideologues even during the Soviet era. A resplendent new version seemed to be on the books for the Bolshoi Theater reopening. But circumstances changed. Somewhere along the chain of command from the Ministry of Culture and Mass Communications, to the Board of Trustees of the Bolshoi Theater, right down to its general director, Glinka’s first opera was scratched in favor of his second, Ruslan and Lyudmila, a fairy tale for adults based on a lewd narrative poem by Pushkin. Perhaps its happy ending explains why it was selected over Glinka’s aggressively anti-Polish first opera. Or perhaps offending Poland was not to be risked in the wake of the airplane crash outside Smolensk, in April 2010, that killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski.

  Tickets were hard to come by, and some of those with tickets in hand worried they were fake. Yet the box office insisted they were authentic, especially those bought for huge sums from the scalper on the street. (The attendant took a cut of the proceeds.) Inside, Jurowski was relaxed, chatting in three languages with his aides, subsisting on regular infusions of caffeine. The director, Chernyakov, was less calm. He faced a daunting creative challenge, because Jurowski had decided to conduct the entire score—all five hours—without making any cuts. This Ruslan and Lyudmila was, like the theater itself, at once a restoration and a reimagining, a reaching back and projecting forward. The music was scrubbed of sanctimonious Soviet-era monumentalism to recover a lighter, antique texture more in keeping with the composer’s original intent. Visually, the staging proved a technological marvel inconceivable in Glinka’s time and unrealizable in any other opera house, anywhere.

  Most of the critics loved it, but the public was divided, with cries of “pozor” (shame) raining down on the performers after the racy third and fourth acts. (Russian television had advertised that the heroine would be receiving an exotic Thai massage in the magical garden where she was imprisoned, so the crowd was primed to disapprove.) Conservative operagoers shook their heads in disgust at the sight of a muscle-bound masseuse dancing a Caucasian lezginka, a dance involving much foot stomping and arm splaying, in a theatrical nod to the garishness of the Azeri-operated Crocus City Mall on the edge of Moscow. There was whistling during the cinematic entr’actes from those who felt that 5,000 rubles ($165) was too steep a price for a trip to the multiplex. Some who left before the end expressed their disapproval by slamming the restored back doors of the restored loges. Three-quarters stayed and cheered.

  Chernyakov not only anticipated the hostile public reaction but even built it into the staging. Elaborate, almost life-sized puppets lampooned a choral round dance in the first scene. The otherwise poignant death of a warrior took the form of an interrupted video transmission. The sorceress Naina mocked the hecklers in the crowd before exiting in a sable coat that concealed the cast on her arm. (She took a fall in act 1, and the bone was set during an especially lengthy intermission.)

  There were two masterstrokes. The first was Jurowski’s conducting, which highlighted, through delicate contrasts in tempo and timbre, the places where Glinka borrowed his supposedly “Russian” music from Italian composers like Rossini and Bellini. The second was the sumptuously sty
lized historical décor of acts 1 and 5. Here Chernyakov provided the audience with the exotic Russia of its own fantasies. Russian directors used to do this for foreign crowds. Now, evidently, it is desired at home.

  Scarcely before the refinished floors of the new Bolshoi were scuffed, the terrible events of 2013 led to resignations, firings, imprisonments, much anxious contemplation, and true soul-searching. What had happened to the Bolshoi Ballet, that glorious troupe that had represented revolution and war in fatigues but had also, tucked back into clean white fabrics, embodied morals and ethics? Had it lost its soul? Detractors and supporters clashed over the state of the theater—and of the nation—as a sense of some sickness, a disease at the core, spread. But the essential nature of the disappeared soul went undefined, remaining an ephemeral and amorphous construct much like ballet itself. The Bolshoi came into being as the Bolshoi in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, and its art nationalized in response. That less animated its soul, however, than the personalities onstage who were powerful and colorful and removed from the muddiness of Moscow in the nineteenth century. Great art was conceived at the Bolshoi, but paradoxically Russian ballet did not realize its own greatness until it was exported elsewhere—to the Mariyinsky in St. Petersburg, to theaters in Paris, London, and New York. One imagines the theater weeping at the injustice of it all. In the twentieth century, the Bolshoi finally became the showcase stage, but the performers remained detached, this time from the ideological obviousness of the subject matter they were obliged to dance and sing. Then with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ascent to power first of chaos, then of Putin, the special radiance associated with the Bolshoi style dimmed. The oddities of people who know nothing but the studio and the stage were exposed along with the infighting, the injustices, and the abuses backstage. Life on the streets leaned toward the lethal and so too, it seemed, did life in the theater.