Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today
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On a freezing night in January 2013, an assailant hurled acid in the face of the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, Sergei Filin. The crime, organized by a lead soloist, dragged one of Russia’s most illustrious institutions into scandal.Under Vladimir Putin, the Bolshoi Theatre has been called on to preserve Russia’s lengthy artistic legacy and to mirror its neo-imperial ambitions. As renowned musicologist Simon Morrison shows in his tour-de-force account, the attack, and its torrid aftermath, underscored the importance of the Bolshoi to the art of ballet, to Russia, and to the world.With exclusive access to state archives and private sources, Morrison sweeps us through the history of the ballet, tracing the political ties that bind the institution to the varying Russian regimes, and detailing the birth of some of the best-loved ballets in the repertoire. From its disreputable beginnings in 1776, the Bolshoi became a point of pride for the tsarist empire after the defeat of Napoleon in 1812.After the revolution, Moscow was transformed into a global capital; meetings of the Communist Party were hosted at the Bolshoi, and the Soviet Union was signed into existence on its stage. Recently, a £450 million restoration has returned the Bolshoi to its former glory, even as prized talent has departed.The Theatre has been bombed, rigged with explosives and reinforced with cement. Its dancers have suffered unimaginable physical torment to climb the ranks. But, as Morrison reveals, the Bolshoi has transcended its own fraught history, surviving 250 years of artistic and political upheaval to define not only Russian culture but also ballet itself.
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For Nika, who retired from ballet
before she was five.
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The role of ballet master thereafter fell to Giuseppe Salomone II, who danced with his much more famous father in London, Vienna, and Milan before finding work with Maddox. He made his debut in Moscow in 1784 with The Fountain of Good and Bad Fortune. His name and those of his three daughters, all musicians, recur in the sources. He is the one Petrovsky ballet master with whom some specific principles can be associated, owing to his mid-career tutelage under the Parisian Noverre, who called for the transformation of ballet from a cheerfully banal confection into a plot-driven, narrative art—an art of grittier, grimmer sentiment. Pantomime was to lend the old noble steps gravitas. The theory was put into practice and acquired a name: ballet d’action. Salomone set several of Noverre’s ballets at the Petrovsky, elevating the genre from simple-minded caprice, but in the process he alienated his audiences. Ballet was supposed to entertain, gaily, with the dancers bursting into street songs, banging drums, and changing their costumes up to eight times per show. It was meant to titillate, not educate—at least not while a retired tightrope walker was in charge.
OVER THE COURSE of his time at the Petrovsky, Maddox produced more than four hundred Russian and foreign ballets, operas, and dramas—including a significant production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute in 1794. The light comic opera The Miller Who Was Also a Magician, a Swindler, and a Matchmaker settled into the repertoire, and for those seeking other delights, the masquerade hall proved popular. From the very beginning, however, expenses outweighed receipts, bringing Maddox into serious legal conflict with one of his designers, Félix Delaval, who sued over unpaid wages and the dishonor of having been turned out on the street. Maddox defended himself by impugning Delaval’s character. “Mr. Delaval came to the hall to ask me for money,” he wrote in a kind of affidavit. “I told him that he had already been given extra, but that if he showed me his mastery I would pay him what he had been promised. He responded with very harsh words and left, but came back two days later and began to blaspheme me in the presence of Captain Alexander Semyonov and the actor Ivan Kaligraf, and also uttered obscenities to Captain Alexander Semyonov, and a few days before that struck the soldier standing on guard.”33 Maddox ended up losing the case and had to compensate Delaval for lost wages, 60 rubles in candles, and 25 rubles in firewood.
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