Читать книгу Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today - Simon Morrison - Страница 8

FROM THE START, the Bolshoi Theater was rife with political and financial intrigue. On March 17, 1776 (O.S.), Catherine the Great granted Prince Urusov of Moscow exclusive rights for the presentation of entertainments using performers foreign and domestic, including serf theaters. The license was granted for ten years, but just four years later, in 1780, it ended up in the hands of an Englishman named Michael Maddox. He ran the theater, then called the Petrovsky, into the ground. The tale of his mysterious business practices long pre-dates the sensational productions of the Bolshoi, but he made the theater fascinating.

MADDOX WAS EITHER a mathematician or a tightrope walker during his youth, and the theater that he helped to found in Moscow either employed professional actors or exploited the talents of orphans—all depending on what half-remembered tale is to be believed. Actual evidence is scant. Maddox advertised his magic shows in Moscow and St. Petersburg newspapers, signed official papers, and implored government officials for forgiveness when he ran into trouble with his numerous creditors.

The stories about his early years in England have a suspicious amount in common with those of Johann Faust, the traveling magician, fortune-teller, and charlatan best known from Goethe’s nineteenth-century play. Just as Faust boasted of his dealings with the devil by way of self-promotion, so too Maddox considerably embellished the facts in the anecdotes he shared about himself. And like Faust, Maddox found himself immortalized in fiction after his death; the Russian writer Alexander Chayanov set one of his gothic short stories in the Petrovsky Theater. Planned for four years but built in just five months, the Petrovsky hosted all manner of entertainments, from ballets to operas to expertly translated Shakespearean dramas to masquerades. Trifling accounts survive about fabulous stage machinery meant to render astonishing meteorological and seismic disturbances. Characters seemed to pass through the floors and walls, while adolescent girls reportedly exposed intimate surfaces in the corps de ballet. Maddox pledged “cumulative” (meaning “harmonious”) entertainments, but he ran afoul of the imperial censors and lost some of his greatest actors to a rival troupe in St. Petersburg.¹ He was also competing with the noblemen who maintained serf orchestras, including the magnate Nikolay Sheremetyev, who had the resources to perform, for a few elites, ballets and operas at his estate outside of Moscow. The competition intensified when Maddox, a popular-theater man, reached past burlesque to offer more substantive fare. He failed to increase his audience. Upper nobles had their serfs to entertain them, and the pious, including the old merchant families of Moscow, stayed away. Maddox went bankrupt, and then, in 1805, his theater burned down—as candlelit, coal-heated theaters with wooden roofs were wont to do. His Jewishness was to blame for the fiasco, anti-Semitic gossip held, even if he had been baptized a Catholic.²

MADDOX LEFT NO LIKENESS, and no references to his appearance exist beyond mention of the crimson cloak he wore year after year. The description of the theater in Chayanov’s fictional story is based on research by the author’s wife, Olga, a cultural historian. For Maddox himself, Chayanov relied on his mind’s eye, embellishing the contemporaneous accounts of the impresario’s “diabolical will” with a reference to “infernal breathing.” The protagonist of the story glimpses Maddox during an opera, illuminated by the chandeliers that remained lit during the performance, as was then the custom. He is imagined sitting amid “undulating waves of blue and black tailcoats, fluttering fans and sparkling lorgnettes, silk bodices and Brabant lace capes.” Maddox exits the auditorium before the second act; the protagonist follows through vaguely lit corridors, up and down stone staircases, past the dressing room of a soprano singing the part of a shackled slave. Maddox is described as tall, with a dusting of gray hair, dressed in a coat of antique cut, oddly blank in affect. “There were no tongues of fire circling him, no stink of sulphur; everything about him seemed quite ordinary and normal,” the novelist writes, “but this diabolical ordinariness was saturated with meaning and power.”³

Maddox comes and goes in the story, which ends in the slush outside of the theater, the protagonist encased in the Moscow night and an atmosphere of neurosis.

The real Michael Maddox was born in England on May 14, 1747, though he claimed to have ancient Russian roots. His Protestant ancestors had immigrated to Russia in the seventeenth century, the era of the Catholic Stuart monarchy, to escape religious persecution. He was the sole surviving son of the English actor Tom Maddox, “who with all his family and troupe” perished in a cargo-boat crash near the Port of Holyhead—all “except one infant who floated ashore in a cradle.”⁴ The orphan was raised by his uncle, Seward, a trumpeter. Following in his father’s footsteps, Maddox became an entertainer, performing tightrope acts in the 1750s at Haymarket Theatre and Covent Garden in London. He balanced a mere three feet above the stage, less to reduce the danger to himself than to his audience. Toward the end of the act, he would hover on one foot while balancing a straw on the edge of a glass and plinking a fiddle. Other anecdotes from London have him blowing a horn and banging a drum on the slack wire. He also tumbled and conducted unspecified physical and mechanical experiments. Outside of London he acted in saltbox theaters and manipulated fairground puppets, with Punch as his favorite. In York “during race week,” he and his troupe performed morning and evening at Merchants Adventurers’ Hall, among other venues.⁵ In the southwest English town of Bath, he entertained ladies and gentlemen along with the servants who held their places while their masters mingled at Simpson’s Rooms. “For a considerable salary,” Maddox pivoted and swung above the audience while balancing a coach wheel and juggling a dozen balls.⁶

Lore has it that Maddox was engaged in mysterious business dealings throughout Europe, which perhaps explains his connections to the English and Russian diplomats (George Macartney and Nikita Panin) who brokered his first visit to Russia in January 1767. Notice of his tightrope act appeared in St. Petersburg in October of that year. The language in the newspaper bulletin suggested a certain age-of-curiosities excitement about Maddox’s debut in the imperial capital: “Herewith it is declared that the celebrated English equilibrist Michael Maddox will be demonstrating his art in the wood winter home, to which all inclined respectable individuals are invited.”⁷

Maddox went to Russia without means—and without knowing the language—but managed, after falsely claiming an Oxford education and some teaching experience, to find work amusing Pavel I, son of the Russian empress, Catherine the Great. Pavel was delighted by his new tutor’s “Cours de recréations mathematique et physiques.”⁸ Maddox must have exceeded expectations, and Catherine declared her gratitude to him in the form of an official letter of commendation. That kept him away from the rabble of the fairground.

He returned to London to direct a theater, but in the 1770s St. Petersburg lured him back. Maddox shelved the magic shows for clock making and the invention of fanciful automatons, including music-box dancers. In tribute to his benefactress, Catherine the Great, he designed an elaborate clock whose bronze and crystal figurines allegorized her achievements. The figure of Hercules, who represented Russia’s suppression of Sweden, stood in the middle of three columns atop a music box. The base was formed by statues of maidens gesturing toward the four corners of the Earth. Every five minutes—the preferred length of meetings at Catherine’s court—chimes rang and miniature eagles dropped jewels from the top of the columns into the open beaks of eaglets in their nests. The gilded vignette was meant to illustrate how the Russian empire nurtured its conquered territories. Engravings on the pedestal and atop the music box showed stars, planets, and the rays of the sun. Catherine the Great herself never saw or heard the clock, however, having died of a stroke in 1796, a decade before Maddox completed it. It was privately sold then put on public display, and during the Revolution confiscated by the state. Eventually, in 1929, it ended up in the Kremlin Armory.

The peregrinations of showmen led to appearances in other Russian cities, including the comparative backwater of Moscow, where the nongovernmental university newspaper Moskovskiye vedomosti (Moscow gazette) announced an exhibition of Maddox’s curiosities. Apparently the show found a following. In a subsequent bulletin from February 1776, he offered (through his Russian-language scribe) heartfelt thanks to the Moscow public for making the show such a huge success, solicitously adding that “after the end of this month the showings will cease, and so as not to deprive pleasure from those desiring to take them in once more, an invitation to attend is with all suitable deference extended.”⁹ He was mindful of competition from other entertainers. The “mechanic and mathematician M. Megellus” also plied his wares in the same newspaper, advertising exhibitions of “various wonders” at the parish of St. John Baptist for 1 ruble (50 kopecks for the cheap seats).¹⁰ The newspaper is crowded with varied squibs that survey the social, cultural, and economic scene at the time. Notices for French-language history books, translations of English publications about plowing, portrait sales, and land auctions appear beneath epigrams to the empress and verses to the New Year. Besides granting space to Maddox, Megellus, and the occasional freak show, Moskovskiye vedomosti printed stories from afar: that of the 175-year-old Argentinian man and the beef-and-millet diet that sustained him, and that of the “girl, age seven or eight, from the French village of Savigné-l’Évêque, who has sprouted hair all over her body and has a beard and moustache hanging from her chin down to her shoulders.”¹¹ Weather reports appeared after the fact: “There was thunder and lightning yesterday afternoon at 5 o’clock and some hail fell, but it did not last for long.”¹²

In Moscow, Maddox improvised an existence for himself as an impresario, catering to a public in search of amusement. Entertainment was prohibited during the Orthodox fasting periods, but even at other times, there was little to do. Maddox sought to fill the void by opening a theater and soon came into possession of one. But not on his own, and not without taking on (then running afoul of) dangerous creditors, the Old Believer merchants who had loaned him thousands of rubles in goods for his enterprise and who did not appreciate his refusal to repay them. Maddox became, in their eyes, the Antichrist, and Moscow needed to be cleansed of his presence.

Maddox also clashed with the xenophobic commander of Moscow, and with a powerful politician who had opened a theater of his own on the grounds of the Imperatorskiy Vospitatel’nïy dom, the Imperial Foundling Home. Once that territorial dispute was resolved, Maddox came to depend on the talented children of the orphanage to dance in his ballets and sing in his operas. For ever after, Moscow had its theater, and the theater had its school.

THE MOSCOW THAT Maddox made home was harsh, a city of tanneries and slaughterhouses, altogether lacking the stern neoclassical grace of St. Petersburg. Fires presented the greatest hazard, since most of the non-government buildings, including the churches, were made of wood. The dead were also a problem. The bubonic plague of 1771 felled a third of the population, including two of Maddox’s potential rivals for control of theatrical entertainments in the city. (At the time, the core of Moscow comprised the area between the white defensive walls of the Kremlin and the outer ditch, gates, and ramparts—what became, by the end of the eighteenth century, the Boulevard Ring.) Cemeteries, like factories, crowded the center until Catherine the Great ordered them relocated beyond the ramparts into the artisan suburbs. The empress disdained Moscow: “besides sickness and fires there is much stupidity there,” which recalled “the beards” of the boyars who had ruled it before her time.¹³ She and her courtiers invaded the Kremlin for her no-expense-spared coronation, but she otherwise kept her distance. Compared to St. Petersburg, the imperial capital on the Gulf of Finland, thirteen postal stations north, Moscow was dissolute, depraved. Upon recognizing that it needed her divine intervention, Catherine drained the swamp, literally, by ordering the encasement of the tributaries of the Moscow River in subterranean pipes. The empress was benevolent when convenient, repressive when required. She quashed the revolt of 1773, for example, but counseled compassion when it came to the execution of the rebels, whose ranks included peasants, former convicts, religious dissenters, and Cossacks. Torture was discouraged, as was the public display of corpses. But such decorum was not extended to the leader of the rebels, Yemelyan Pugachev. He was hauled to Moscow from Kazakhstan in a metal cage, then decapitated and dismembered in Bolotnaya Square.

Prussian by birth, Catherine ascended to the throne in 1762 after securing the arrest of her puerile husband, Peter III. He had ruled Russia for just half a year, enacting a series of halfhearted reforms that aided the poor but offended the lower noble ranks. They forced him to abdicate, after which he was placed under house arrest in his manor in Ropsha. Catherine allowed him to keep his servant, dog, and violin, but not his lover. In July 1762, he died, cause unknown. Alexei Orlov, the coup-plotting brother of Catherine’s own lover, blamed Peter’s death on a drunken quarrel with his guards. Catherine attributed his demise to cowardice. “His heart was excessively small, and also dried up,” she recalled, after ordering his bruised corpse opened up.¹⁴ She described the day she became empress (before her husband’s death) with more warmth:

I was almost alone at Peterhof [Palace], amongst my women, seemingly forgotten by everyone. My days, however, were much disturbed, for I was regularly informed of all that was plotting both for and against me. At six o’clock on the morning of the 28th, Alexei Orlov entered my room, awoke me, and said very quietly, “It is time to get up; everything is prepared for proclaiming you.” I asked for details. He replied, “Pacik [Peter III] has been arrested.” I no longer hesitated, but dressed hastily, without waiting to make my toilet, and entered the carriage which he had brought with him.¹⁵

As empress, Catherine rose at dawn to attend to affairs of state, ensuring that meetings did not exceed the five-minute span Maddox would represent in his clock. She maintained a discreet but adventurous love life; the goings-on in her bedchamber later prompted ludicrous Soviet-era gossip about decadent sexual practices, including bestiality. Official records reveal that she overhauled the Russian legal system, pushed the boundaries of the empire westward, and ordered the construction of more than a hundred towns in eleven provinces. Besides the establishment of the Imperial Foundling Home, her educational reforms in Moscow included the opening of two gymnasia under the aegis of Moscow University. The first of these was for the sons and daughters of noblemen, the second for the sons and daughters of commoners. Some of Maddox’s eleven children attended the latter.

TO OPERATE HIS THEATER, Maddox needed a partner from the upper noble ranks. He found it in the Moscow provincial prosecutor, Prince Pyotr Urusov. Among the prince’s duties was overseeing the masquerades, fairground booths, strongmen, and trained bears of Moscow. In March 1776, the governor general of Moscow, Mikhaíl Volkonsky, granted the prince a decade-long exclusive permit for theatrical presentations. Urusov had earlier collaborated with an Italian impresario, Melchiore Groti, but the relationship soured, and Groti vanished “to God knows where” with the costumes and the salaries owed to the staff.¹⁶ The municipal police could not catch him. Maddox came to Urusov’s rescue, convincing him of the financial and logistical benefits of a partnership while also mesmerizing him with visions of fantastic spectacles to be staged in dedicated spaces. Since there was no shortage of unemployed professional actors in Moscow, neither Urusov nor Maddox thought to enlist amateur talent—namely, the girls and boys who were being taught four hours per day, four days per week, on the grounds of the Imperial Foundling Home. The actors from the bankrupt Moscow Public Theater would suffice, along with some serfs.

On August 31, 1776, Urusov and Maddox formalized their relationship. The contract between them was certified by the police and survives in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. It runs just four lines, the first reaffirming Urusov’s ten-year monopoly, after which, in 1786, Maddox would be granted a ten-year monopoly of his own. Tucked into the mix was the unusual detail that Maddox was to provide 3,100 rubles a year to the Imperial Foundling Home. His contribution to the drama and music school on its grounds did not mean, at the time, that he could exploit the talents of the orphans. That was a later development that would arise when he fulfilled the last stipulation in the agreement with Urusov: the construction, by 1781, of a proper theater in Moscow. Advertised as entertainment for the entire nation, the theater was to be built of stone and surrounded by a moat for the prevention of fires. Its “accessories” were at once to pamper its patrons and improve the skyline.¹⁷

MADDOX AND URUSOV acquired a parcel of land on an ancient thoroughfare in central Moscow. It had once served as the home of lance- and spear-makers, hence the name of one of the cathedrals that dominated the neighborhood: the Cathedral of the Transfiguration on the Spear. The plot was on Petrovka Street, parallel to the half-finished underground tunnel that would, following its completion in 1792, guide water from the north of the city into the Moscow River along what is now Neglinnaya Street. The water had once wrapped itself around the Kremlin, serving as a natural defense against invaders to the east.

Before the theater on Petrovka Street was built, Maddox and Urusov arranged performances on Znamenka Street, in a theater located on an estate belonging to Roman Vorontsov. During the summer Maddox also began to organize Sunday concerts and fireworks in the public gardens on the southern outskirts of Moscow. Admission through the covered entrance into the gardens, which Maddox modeled along the lines of the London Vauxhall, was 1 ruble or 2, depending on whether the visitor sat for tea in the rotunda. The Italian theater manager Count Carlo Brentano de Grianti was charmed by the place when he visited in the 1790s, but since the gardens appealed to tradesmen—cobblers, hatters, and corset-makers—the upper ranks kept their distance. Grianti’s description of the gardens is briefer than his accounts of the passions of Russian countesses, Siberian gems, gambling at the English Club, and masked balls at the court of Catherine the Great. But he finds room to mention the great “profit” that “the theater entrepreneur M. Maddox” made in the gardens on holidays.¹⁸

Maddox sank some of that profit into the Znamenka playhouse, renovating it in time for the premiere of the Russian comic opera The Miller Who Was Also a Magician, a Swindler, and a Matchmaker (Mel’nik—koldun, obmanshchik i svat, 1779). The score is chockablock with buffoonish, rustic ditties of broad appeal, even to non-Russians; the best of the tunes are heard in the central devichnik scene, a kind of bachelorette party for the heroine. The music was put together by the violinist Mikhaíl Sokolovsky, who had been added to Maddox’s payroll as a favor to his wife and sister, both talented music-theatrical performers. The opera was a success, lasting much longer in the repertoire than the theater itself.

But the fixes were cosmetic. The Znamenka was a firetrap, and Maddox complained about its flammable flimsiness in a letter to the governor general. Sure enough, “negligent lower servants who lived in the basement” sparked an inferno.¹⁹ The playhouse burned to the ground on February 26, 1780, during an unscheduled intermission in a performance of The False Dmitri, a play based on actual historical events in Russia (the cursed period of famine, usurpers, and impostors known as the Time of Troubles). The lead role was played by a court-educated thirty-six-year-old actor named Ivan Kaligraf, who supplemented the income he received from Maddox by giving acting lessons at the orphanage.

Kaligraf, who had survived the bubonic plague in Moscow, perished after the fire. He caught a cold while attempting to douse the flames. The sniffle developed into pneumonia, and then fever of the brain. Moskovskiye vedomosti did not report his death and focused instead on the survival of the governor general, the brave servants who saved their masters, and the prompt actions of the police in preventing the blaze from spreading to nearby houses by sealing off the ends of the street. Had the fire spread, scores might have perished, since most of the dwellings in the area were nothing more than collections of tree trunks purchased at market.

An entire article in Moskovskiye vedomosti was dedicated to the loss in the fire of a bejeweled chapeau, “on which was sewn instead of buttons a large ring of a single diamond with smaller diamonds sprinkled around.”²⁰ A hunting hat with diamond thread also vanished in the panicked flight from the theater, along with a pair of round earrings and “a silver buckle of gold and crystal.”²¹ A handsome reward was promised for the return of these items to their owner, an imperial senator. But the newspaper said not a word about the death of one of the best actors in the city.

Urusov suffered a huge financial loss in the fire and was forced to surrender his share of the theater to Maddox for 28,550 rubles. Imperial officials offered to reassign Urusov’s rights to Maddox as long as the stone theater was finally built on Petrovka Street. Construction of the theater, the future Bolshoi, had not even begun when the Znamenka burned down. To see the project through to completion, Maddox needed to borrow a huge sum of 130,000 rubles while also settling the bill for the damage to the Vorontsov estate and continuing, per imperial decree, to supplement the budget of the orphanage. Since the fire had deprived him of income, he was forced to borrow repeatedly from the Opekunskiy sovet, the governing board, which was established under Catherine the Great for the care of orphans and widows, and whose activities included a pawnshop and a mortgage brokerage.

Maddox had secured an architect for the project, Christian Rosberg, but progress was delayed owing to Rosberg’s health problems. In 1778, he suffered from “painful seizures” after being exposed to noxious fumes and had to surrender his position as a building inspector.²² It took Rosberg four years just to come up with a model for the theater. The pressure from Maddox’s creditors was intense. He turned the threat to his advantage by appealing to the highest power in the land, Catherine the Great, for assistance mobilizing a brigade of builders. Work proceeded apace, and the theater was completed by the end of 1780. Maddox was saved—at least for the moment. The governor general found himself obliged to instruct the police, in a disquieting memo from March 31, 1780, “to accord Maddox special reverence and respect and protect him from unpleasantness … Seeking to bestow pleasure on the public, he had traded all of his capital to construct a huge and magnificent theater and remained burdened by debt.”²³

The plans for the theater survive, although most of the images only detail the exterior and surrounding structures. The theater had a single entrance and exit, with three stone staircases inside leading up to the parterre and the three tiers of loges; two wooden staircases led to the galleries above. Later a plank-covered mezzanine and a masquerade rotunda with elaborate garland moldings, portraits, and mirrors would be attached by corridor to the theater. The rough granite square at the front of the theater was on higher ground than the fuel-storage area in the back. Wooden buildings cramped the square to the right and left, spoiling the view of the theater from the distance and posing a fire risk. Maddox occupied one of these buildings; another perhaps served as his horse stable and carriage house. The statelier buildings on Petrovka were held by aristocratic clans. The artists of the theater slept in garrets and frequented the clammy, soiled Petrovka tavern. General Major Stepan Apraksin, destined to be a front-line commander in the war against Napoleon, occupied a residence farther up the street, not far from the carved stone façade, made to look like leaf and vine, of the Church of the Resurrection.

The belief has always been that the Bolshoi Theater was built on the foundations of the Petrovsky, but urban archeology places them 136 to 168 feet apart—the Bolshoi being that much closer to the Kremlin. Much as with the Staatsoper and the old Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, Maddox’s stone block theater with slanted wooden roof did not titivate the skyline, but it was impressive for its time, rivaled only by the Senate Palace, the neoclassical building that now serves as the Kremlin residence of the Russian president, and Pashkov House, which became the first public museum in Moscow.

For a description of the inside, there are the piecemeal recollections of the noblemen who attended the six-o’clock performances in the 1780s. From their carriages, which were parked by a watering point to the side of the theater, they ascended a torchlit central staircase past the parterre into their leased loges, 110 in all, and further ascended, during entr’actes, to a buffet of cold cuts catered, according to the records, by a Frenchman. Entrance to the parterre cost 1 ruble, the galleries 50 kopecks. The audience on the floor and in the rafters included bureaucrats, students, merchants, officers, and valets. Mention is made in the sources of commodes for the ladies. The ceiling of the theater was fashioned from canvas-covered planks that, to the dismay of those trying to listen, deadened the sound of the orchestra. Large wax and tallow candles in forty-two chandeliers illuminated the space and mixed an odor akin to singed hair with the smell of the patrons. The light was magnified by mirrors onstage and off; torch dances by masked male and female performers served as rough-and-ready spotlights; handheld candles in the audience were used to read programs. Underground were nooks for the dress- and wigmaker, rooms for making and storing props and panels, and practice spaces for the musicians. Even those who could read music sometimes learned their parts by rote, saving Maddox the cost of a copyist, paper, and ink. Coal stoves heated the theater and the masquerade rotunda.

The hall was Maddox’s greatest pride and greatest expense. (Most of the loans he obtained from the Opekunskiy sovet went to its construction.) The Englishman Charles Hatchett, an amateur chemist and son of the imperial Russian coach maker, recalled Maddox boasting to him that the masquerade rotunda could hold 5,000 people. Hatchett was either mistaken in his recollection or referring to the number of people who could be accommodated in Moscow’s public gardens, which had entertainments of their own. Or perhaps Maddox was simply exaggerating. In truth, the rotunda could hold 2,000 people, excluding the musicians in the rafters, and the theater itself no more than 900. Hatchett further observed that, no matter the size of the crowd, the well-heeled in the loges could preserve their privacy: “The boxes had veils of light silk to draw before the front so that those in them may be seen or not at their pleasure.”²⁴

Maddox pampered the elite, his season-pass holders, with coal heat and fashion brochures, and he invited them to rent their loges in advance so that they might “decorate them as they saw fit.”²⁵ The seating plan recalled a chessboard, with the queens and bishops stacked at the back, and the pawns, the single-ticket holders, gathered before them. The participants in the masquerades, in contrast, tended to be “idlers and spendthrifts” looking for fun, and “gentry seeking grooms for their daughters.”²⁶ The decadence and occasional tawdriness of the masquerades added to the allure of Maddox’s theater and inspired a grisly tale of fiction, “Concert of Demons,” whose hero, a former asylum inmate, suffers a psychotic episode in the Petrovsky. Sparks fall from the stars onto the roof of the theater as he wanders past a decrepit lantern-holder into the rotunda, which is illuminated, poorly, by smoking tapers in the chandeliers. The hero peers through the murk and the seductive swirl of red-and-black domino masks to behold, on the orchestra platform, Frankensteinian grotesquerie: “Necks of storks with faces of dogs, bodies of oxen with heads of swallows, cocks with goats’ feet, goats with men’s hands.”²⁷ The powdered, owl-faced conductor leads the band in a respectable performance of the overture to The Magic Flute. The hero is introduced to the ghosts of famous composers. Then he is seized. “In half a minute,” the conductor tears his right leg off, “leaving nothing but bone and dry sinews; the latter he began to stretch out like strings.”²⁸ His remaining leg dances to the music before he loses consciousness.

The author of the 1834 tale, Mikhaíl Zagoskin, claimed, in tribute to Maddox, that it was based on actual events.

MADDOX’S INITIAL BUDGET for performers was just under 23,000 rubles, with the cost of operating the theater and the masquerade rotunda, including the salaries paid to the doctor, the coal stoker, and the hairdresser and wigmaker coming to 28,500 rubles. His roster included thirteen actors, seven actresses, and a dozen musicians. There were also seven dancers, three male, four female, who were denied room and board, and who earned pittances: 72 rubles a season in the case of the least-skilled ballerina. His lead actors came from a playhouse that had operated in Moscow in the 1760s under the direction of the composer Nikolay Titov. Nadezhda Kaligraf, widow of Ivan, earned a modest 600 rubles a season for delivering lines such as the following from the German bourgeois tragedy Miss Sara Sampson: “A short disappearance with a lover is a stain, it is true; but still a stain which time effaces. In some time, all will be forgotten, and for a rich heiress there are always men to be found, who are not so scrupulous.”²⁹ She parried onstage with Vasiliy Pomerantsev, a subtle Shakespearean actor much coveted by Maddox’s rivals—those upper nobles who conspired to pry his exclusive rights away from him. Pomerantsev earned a proper 2,000 rubles for up to a hundred performances a year and did not mind his employer insisting that his lines not be cued from the wings or through a hole in the front of the stage.

The theater opened its doors on the eve of New Year’s Eve, December 30, 1780, with a dramatic prologue that extolled not Catherine the Great, as would have been de rigueur in the Imperial Theaters, but Maddox himself. The deities of the arts, Momus and Thalia, are cast out of Moscow when their theater burns down but return incognito aided by other mythological celebrities. A chorus greets them at the entrance to the theater on Petrovka to proclaim the end of their suffering in a boring, unfree world without art. The prologue pokes at the ulcer of theatrical censorship while also boasting of Maddox’s talents as entertainer. It was written by the satirist Alexander Ablesimov, the librettist of The Miller Who Was Also a Magician, a Swindler, and a Matchmaker, the comic opera that stood as Maddox’s biggest success to date. It was a step up from the witty fables that Ablesimov spent most of his time writing.

Next on the program was a presumably recycled, quickly stitched-together piece of pantomime and dance called L’école enchantée, or The Magic School. Little is known about it beyond a playbill listing the dramatis personae and the names of the ballet master, costumer, designer, and five lead performers. The masks, silks, panels, and screens are long lost. As was typical of ballets at the time, characters came from myth, and their gestures were perhaps derived from picture books, illustrated tales of the ancient world. The inclusion of the magician Mercurius, god of eloquence and commerce in L’école enchantée, suggests that it was intended as an allegorical illustration of Maddox’s illusion-filled career.

The music, also lost, came from the quill and inkpot of Josef Starzer, an industrious, well-connected Viennese composer credited with dozens of ballets. His collaborations with the influential ballet master Jean-Georges Noverre enhanced his international reputation, as did the itinerant dancers who spread his music around. Starzer fraternized at the Russian court with the Austrian dancer Leopold Paradis, who performed in St. Petersburg for almost two decades before getting a teaching position in Moscow at the Imperial Foundling Home. There Paradis taught classes of fifteen girls and fifteen boys on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from nine to noon, casting them in “sérieux,” “demi-caractère,” and “grotesque” roles based on their faces, not their feet.³⁰ His agreement with the Foundling Home required him to set a new ballet every other year on his students, while also providing instruction in traditional partnered social dances: Polish minuets and contra dances. Those students with natural talent and true zeal were given extra training. The curriculum lasted three years, with an exam after the first year deciding whether students had sufficient suppleness to proceed. Those who flunked were immediately replaced, since Paradis built his entire pedagogical method on classes of thirty.

Paradis was paid 2,000 rubles a year by the orphanage and given a housing, firewood, and candle allowance of another 200 rubles (he had requested 300). He was old-fashioned enough for the orphanage to want him dismissed, but its overseer in St. Petersburg was unwilling to compensate him for the termination of his contract and approve the appointment of a new teacher, so he was kept on the payroll. Meantime, Paradis was involved in a dispute with a former employer in St. Petersburg over wages owed. No one was happy, and complaints flew back and forth on luxury paper bearing florid signatures.

Sixteen of the children in Paradis’s class danced in L’école enchantée. Their names are not included on the surviving playbill. The names of the adult dancers, the principals, are given, but they must have been traveling performers, since they are nowhere to be found on other Petrovsky Theater programs.

It hardly mattered, since ballet at the Petrovsky Theater was of much less importance to Maddox than opera and drama. It was also derivative, replicating Italian and French practices, and posing no threat to the bigger-budget ballets staged at court in St. Petersburg. The pantomimes Maddox produced had resonant names like The Fountain of Good and Bad Fortune, but gauging what exactly occurred onstage is hopeless. There exists the occasional newspaper bulletin about fantastic special effects and elaborate costume changes, as in the case of a ballet from 1781 titled Harlequin Sorcerer, whose trickster hero appeared in at least eight different outfits. Maddox also mounted the ballet Acis and Galatea at the Petrovsky. The ballet, to music by Franz Hilverding—a composer in and out of debtor’s prison—had been performed in the Winter Palace by noble amateurs with amazing (for the time) special effects.³¹ The hero, the poor shepherd Acis, falls into the hands of the reprehensible Cyclops Polyphemus, who hurls him through the air toward a mountain. He would have been killed by the blow had he not been saved by Love. Polyphemus goes for the kill again in the second act, this time hurling an entire cliff toward Acis and his beloved, the beautiful nymph Galatea. Love intervenes once more, gathering the shepherd and nymph into his arms and sweeping them through the clouds into his namesake kingdom. Neither the pulleys and ropes used to produce these marvels nor the reactions of the audience to them are mentioned in the sources. It was said, however, that when the ballet was presented at the Winter Palace, the apotheosis brought tears to Catherine the Great’s eyes.

Maddox first relied on Paradis as ballet teacher and creator before turning to expatriate Italian talent. In 1782, Maddox enlisted Francesco Morelli, a Milanese dancer who had performed for seven years in St. Petersburg before settling into a teaching position at Moscow University. Morelli’s sacrifice to his art left his once-acrobatic legs battered and fragile and his feet (in the opinion of one of his students) “scorched.”³² The official records of his career cannot be trusted, since he suffered amnesia in his dotage and filled them with errors. It seems that, near the end of his life, he taught dance to serfs, but evidence also finds him doing clerical work and engaged in regular disputes with his employer. He married the daughter of a count and lived in the count’s home, later boasting that he somehow prevented its destruction by Napoleon’s troops. Morelli remained with Maddox for about fourteen years. His tasks included teaching classes and leading rehearsals; ordering masks, costumes, and props; arranging auditions; moving dancers on and off of the stage; and cueing the orchestra. Morelli created ballets about star-crossed love, ancient and modern, on land and sea, but nothing that lasted beyond a single season. His brother Cosmo, a dancer of loose morals involved in several sex scandals, helped him with his work. Morelli’s final ballet for Maddox was The Two-Timed Village Doctor—an attractive potpourri organized much like a comic opera, but with gesture doing the work of song.

When Morelli became feeble, Maddox turned to Pietro Pinucci and his wife, Columba, who in their three years at the helm increased the number of ballets produced annually at the Petrovsky from twenty-five to thirty-five. Some gained a toehold in the repertoire, but most were forgotten, the two-part dances mixed and matched together for use as entr’actes or interludes under different names.

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.

Maddox muddled through these and other conflicts, scrimping on salaries, candles, and firewood, and ignoring the resulting complaints about the chilliness in the hall. But in 1783, his third year running the Petrovsky Theater, he faced a grave threat to his livelihood from an unlikely place: the orphanage. The crisis began when Maddox clashed with a senior official in the imperial government, Ivan Betskoy. Betskoy served as personal assistant to Catherine the Great on matters related to educational enlightenment and presided over the Imperial Academy of the Arts. Betskoy had founded the orphanage in 1763 and subsequently demonstrated, in the remaining years of his life, a sincere concern for the children under his care.

The orphanage, an immense quadrangle, was located on a bend of the Moscow River, adjacent to the Moscow market district called Kitay-gorod. The name now translates as Chinatown, but the ramshackle collection of stalls and workshops had nothing remotely Chinese about it. (The archaic Russian word kita refers to plaiting or braiding, and it is thought that basket weavers once plied their trade in the area.) The Opekunskiy sovet managed the finances of the orphanage, and advertisements for its mortgage brokerage and pawnshop appeared in Moskovskiye vedomosti. Funding came from a lucrative 5-kopeck tax on playing cards. (The empress decreed that the packages would show the symbol of the orphanage—a stork—along with the slogan “She feeds her chicks absent concern for herself.”)³⁴ There were also discreet donations from noblemen who had fathered children out of wedlock and a separate tax on public entertainments. Enough money was left over after basic expenses to import musical instruments from abroad, together with colored pencils, “bows,” and “screws.”³⁵ The orphans assumed the surnames of the princes and princesses who funded their care (the twenty orphans supported each year at the bequest of Princess Marianna Gessen-Gomburgskaya took the last surname Gomburtsev, for example), but the imperial pedigree did not spare them from manual labor in factories and mills in their adulthoods.

Betskoy had conceived the orphanage as a school of manners for the emancipated children of serfs, those whose parents had died in the bubonic plague, or those who had been abandoned by soldiers and peasants. By improving the lives of these unfortunates, Betskoy imagined fostering a third caste, an enlightened middle class between the nobles and peasants. Inspired by the Enlightenment thinkers Locke and Rousseau, he argued in his elegant fashion that children come into the world neither good nor evil, but like a wax seal into which anything could be etched. The boys and girls at the orphanage were to be imprinted with laudable inclinations: love of hard work, fear of idleness, compassion, politeness, tidiness, and cleanliness. Engineering the heart and soul was as essential as training the intellect. Tutoring in foreign languages and the arts, including dance, music, and theater, was meant to shield the children from baser influences. The first children to learn ballet were the offspring of palace servants. But shocking death rates at the orphanage (even instances of dead and dying babies being left at the door), an epidemic of child abuse, and tales of embezzlement sullied Betskoy’s plans. He offered rewards for the rescue of babies from gutters and troughs and could not countenance that the shelter he had opened for them lacked the proper resources—including wet nurses—to keep them alive. Some of the pain he felt on behalf of his older adoptees can be detected in a letter that he wrote to the governing board, protesting the use of corporal punishment and harshness of the cabinet- and textile-making rooms:

As a result of various rumors circulating here I have learned that the wards, especially those of the female sex, are being brought up in a manner quite disgraceful; I do not mean that they should be taught to be vain and prideful, for true education cannot consist in that, but one ought to find a mean, so that a human being could esteem the human in himself and yet know how to be equal to one’s station, whatever that may be, and, allowing no one to treat him as if he were a beast, would wish to fulfill, with diligence and as if it were an honor, all obligations imposed upon him in accordance with said station. Above all they say about those wards who have been apprenticed to manufacturers, and in particular about those assigned to Tanauer, that they are being kept in conditions that are in no way commensurate with human society, and are worse than those befitting servile commoners.³⁶

As always, ideals collided with reality, one that clean forks and bowls and napkins changed every three days could not conceal, except for foreign guests, whose impression of the place was that of a Potemkin village, the children dancing around the beaming director in gratitude for their lamb and rice and iron beds. Behind the scenes, maidens were raped by the staff—a serious matter, since pregnant single women risked savage beatings to precipitate miscarriages and the perilous disgrace of banishment to Siberia. For other wards, the experience of the Enlightenment consisted of toiling in overheated, unventilated rooms, winding cotton and spinning flax, being flogged with knouts if their quotas went unmet. Few of them sang; even fewer danced.

Betskoy, the proud, stout representative of the proud, stout empress, ensured that visitors came away with a positive impression. In the autumn of 1786, Sir Richard Worsley (an English statesman and antiquities collector) traveled to Moscow on the back end of a European tour, noting the potholed roads leading into the city but also the “noble view” of churches and palaces from six kilometers out. He dined with Maddox on September 27 and 30, going to the theater after the first meal and raising glasses to the health of counts, countesses, and their children at the noblemen’s club after the second. The singers were better than the actors in Maddox’s enterprise, Worsley believed, adding that just one of the actors survived the merciless heckling from the parterre to give “general satisfaction.” Worsley included a visit to the orphanage on his itinerary, and describes in his memoirs the “innocuous” but soon-to-be “augmented” building that gave shelter to 4,000 orphans “who are taught music, geography and moral history.” The girls, he adds, “embroider and make very good lace.” The director, Georg Gogel, talked him through the budget: “The expense of the different masters and teachers who overlook the children amounts annually to 40,000 rubles, the fixed pension of this hospital from the crown is 70,000 rubles, besides which they are supposed to have a fund of some 3 million, which they lend out at interest.” Overall, Worsley found the place “admirably well conducted, and each child has a bed, the girls are in a ward by themselves, and the dinner throughout the whole is changed twice a week. There is also a small collection of natural history, to instruct those who are to follow that pursuit, a music room and a library. The wards for the lying-in women are in another separate building, where the women may come when they please, and return home without the least expense, nor can any question whatever be asked them.” A touch of wryness: “I was informed by the director that great advantage of this part of the institution was taken by the nobility.”³⁷ (Worsley could sympathize: His estranged wife, Seymour Fleming, had given birth to a boy fathered by another man and was rumored to have taken more than two dozen lovers in 1782 alone.)

At least at first, the entertainments put on by the orphans were intended just for the children themselves, their minders, and visiting dignitaries. Little survives of these performances beyond playbills and unspecific anecdotes. In 1778, Count Pyotr Sheremetyev attended a play and a Russian comic opera and was impressed enough to “perpetuate the pleasure he had expressed verbally by donating one hundred rubles” for distribution to “orphans of both sexes in the theater.”³⁸ The children also put on a ballet on a subject of dubious moral content: Shakespeare’s lascivious poem Venus and Adonis, in which a goddess takes a mortal lover by force. On other occasions they performed “Chinese shadows,” which entailed speaking their lines behind screen partitions and waging great battles with their hands and fingers.³⁹ Since these were private events, the performances did not pose a threat to Maddox. But in 1783 a baron and donor (Ernst Wanzura) petitioned the empress to license the in-house theater for public performances. Catherine agreed, and the orphanage went into the entertainment business, mounting French and Russian dramas, operas, and pantomime-harlequinades.

The English cleric William Coxe supplies a precious, albeit vague, eyewitness account of one of these shows, coupled with an expression of surprise at the absence of “unwholesome smells” in the nursery and the sweetness of the bread baked by the oldest orphans for feeding to the youngest at sunrise and sunset. The performers “constructed the stage, painted the scenes, and made the dresses” for the comic opera he attended. During the performance, they “trod the stage” with ease. “There were some agreeable voices,” and “the orchestra was filled with a band by no means contemptible, which consisted entirely of foundlings, except the first violin, who was their music master.” Coxe heard the singers but did not see dancers, since “on this occasion the play was not, as usual, concluded with a ballet, because the principal performer was indisposed, which was no small disappointment, as we were informed that they dance ballets with great taste and elegance.”⁴⁰

Seeking permission to continue operating the theater, the director of the orphanage boasted of the success of these performances to Betskoy in a letter dated June 13, 1784: “Each day our theater gets a little better, to the greatest satisfaction of the public. The directors of the noblemen’s club … informed me that their members intend to send a letter of gratitude to the governing board, including 2,000 rubles in this letter to be shared among the orphans who have distinguished themselves in the theater.”⁴¹

Betskoy did not share the noblemen’s delight and abandoned his phlegmatic demeanor to voice his outrage. He attended one of the ballets and was appalled, seeing not images of “great taste and elegance” but filthiness, postures fit for a “brothel theater.”⁴² He feared the orphanage theater becoming like the larger serf theaters operating in Moscow during the period—places of impure pleasures, whose vulnerable female performers did more for their masters than dance and sing.

Unaware that Betskoy was planning to abolish the orphanage theater, Maddox flew into a rage, or at least pretended to, about the violation of his privilege. First he sent the police to warn the publisher of Moskovskiye vedomosti against promoting the orphanage theater, and then he took the matter to the imperial court. Long forgotten was Maddox’s own plan, back in 1779, for the orphanage to invest in the building of his theater. For his change of heart, Betskoy turned against him and judged his character suspect. Soon Maddox had a different agenda, one that he expressed to the governor general of Moscow, Zakhar Chernïshov. “Lend the hand of benevolence to a foreigner who surrenders his entire being to the justness of your Most Gracious Majesty,” he pleaded with fake innocence, and “consider the unfortunate predicament of my family and those who have entrusted their capital to me.”⁴³ The rhetoric did Maddox no good. The governor general took the matter to the empress, who instructed him to settle it on his own. Betskoy, for his part, also sent a letter to Chernïshov, expressing astonishment that a “foreigner who has come to enrich himself” could have the “impudence” to claim control over that which was most “sacred”: control of the nation’s culture.⁴⁴

The court declared that the orphanage was permitted to operate a theater irrespective of Maddox’s exclusive rights. Incongruously, given his initial protests, the decision allowed him to solve his financial problems—at least for the moment. He proposed absorbing the orphanage theater into his own enterprise, pledging to cover the costs of “an apartment and firewood” and restraining himself from “selling” the girls “for money.”⁴⁵ He also proposed helping those orphans “who wished to pursue happiness elsewhere” by negotiating their contracts with other parties—a sly way of keeping tabs on the competition, but also perhaps an acknowledgment of the miserly salaries and grievous contractual bondage he was offering.⁴⁶ Maddox also said that he would hire the dance, music, and acting teachers of the orphanage for the Petrovsky. And he agreed to purchase, for 4,000 rubles, the costumes and props that the orphans had been using.

The sleight of hand was Maddox’s repeated insistence on also operating the orphanage theater—but not the orphanage theater that had been in operation for the past year. Maddox proposed to expand his public theater empire by selling that structure and opening another one in Kitay-gorod, one that would be bigger, sturdier, and potentially more lucrative. His conniving drew a heated response from a member of the governing board:

As regards the notion, to my mind unimaginable, that the wooden theater deeded by Her Majesty be sold at a public auction, such stipulations astonish me. For where will our wards, then, perform? Surely not in a theater erected in the auditorium in the orphanage’s central corpus? In that case we would have to invite inside the orphanage the municipal police and defer to its authority, since its presence is required whenever public entertainments are staged, with the entire city flocking to the very locale to which no stranger ought to be admitted.⁴⁷

Maddox would drop the idea of building a second theater, though not before securing funding for it from the governing board, earning him the reputation of the cleverest of the clever when it came to financial dealings.

The negotiations lasted several months and were freighted with suspicion by those noblemen who thought the Petrovsky evil, a disreputable place guaranteed to harm the orphans, soil them inside. But after much agonizing and rewriting of the contracts, Maddox got his way: He received fifty ballet pupils, twenty-four actors, and thirty musicians from the orphanage and all but 10 percent of the income from their exploitation. The agreement reflected the notion that bad could be turned into good, that the orphans would cleanse Maddox’s theater, rather than being soiled by it. Such had been the justification for involving the orphanage in the selling of playing cards and pawning of jewelry. These sinful activities became noble when used to rescue homeless children from the streets and enlighten the masses. Maddox too was liberated by the idea that the ends justified the means. Financial crimes became pious in the service of the ballets and operas performed at the Petrovsky, or what Maddox began to refer to as the Grand Theater, “the Bolshoi.”

Maddox retained his monopoly. Neither the orphanage nor its instructors nor the foreign theatrical troupes that the orphanage had brought to Moscow could operate without his consent. And by bringing the orphanage theater under the aegis of the Petrovsky, Maddox managed to shield himself from his merchant creditors, to whom he owed, they alleged, 90,000 rubles. Some of what he took from them came in the form of cash, but he had also relied on them for building materials and furniture. Banks as institutions did not yet exist in Russia, and the magnates and moneylenders of Poland had not been integrated into the empire. Maddox had no option but to seek loans from a claque of Ryazan-Moscow merchants, who for centuries had been the sole group in Russia with serious amounts of cash at their disposal. The poet Alexander Pushkin borrowed from the merchants, as did the state, but it was unprecedented for a single individual to be so dependent on credit, as opposed to receiving a grant from the empress, to operate a public institution. Having sunk his personal savings from his magic shows and the Taganka neighborhood Vauxhall into the operation of the Petrovsky, Maddox had no practical intention of paying the loans back. He also knew that the barrel-bellied, bearded boyars would seek his hide if he defaulted. His theater—and his safety—rested on receiving the blessing, as well as the protection, of his other creditors: the powerful noblemen of the governing board. Once he had obtained this protection, Maddox took an audacious step. He appealed to the board for additional financing. Apparently Maddox’s ambition, not to mention his slyness, knew no bounds.

The confrontation with the merchants was postponed as the financial standing of the existing theater continued to deteriorate. Between 1786 and 1791 the Petrovsky stagnated. Frustrated by the repertoire choices and miserable salaries, some of Maddox’s star performers relocated to St. Petersburg and the Imperial Theaters. Leased serfs and the orphanage provided replacements, including some true talents. Maddox hired Arina Sobakina and Gavrila Raykov, two comic dancers taught by Paradis, as well as the great actor Andrey Ukrasov, purported to be a trendsetter among young Muscovites—but these overexposed, underpaid performers could not, on their own merits, keep the Petrovsky afloat.

Maddox could not pay interest on his debt, much less pay down the principal, and his efforts in 1786 to solicit even more funding from the Opekunskiy sovet predictably came to naught. He was branded a deadbeat. His merchant lenders renewed their demands for repayment, raising the interest rates and threatening him with prison. He tried to plead his case in St. Petersburg, “going there during the winter for five months and in the end leaving my petition behind without any hope of it being taken up.”⁴⁸ Then, back in Moscow that same year before the governing board, he fell to his knees: “Since I have no means whatsoever to settle my debts, that which is owed to the orphanage and my particular creditors,” he begged, “I find myself for faithful payment with no recourse but to surrender the entire matter to the governing board, and with it to surrender myself, all of my possessions and the income they provide, in free will to the management of the governing board.”⁴⁹

With that, the theater on Petrovka Street, later known as the Bolshoi, became a government operation. The Opekunskiy sovet assumed complete control over the building and its finances. Maddox retained the title of general director, along with a budget of 27,000 rubles to pay his performers, the doctor, the furnace stoker, and the hairdresser. His salary was pegged to the success of the ballets and operas that he staged—5,000 rubles if receipts from the performances exceeded 50,000 rubles, 3,000 rubles if not. If, as was expected, expenses outweighed receipts, then he would receive nothing, not even firewood and candles for his apartment. To survive, Maddox appealed to the masses, staging more comedies than tragedies. The rich regarded him with suspicion, but he had a common touch. His repertoire choices showed his preference for exuberant childlike characters, mad dreamers rather than representatives of boring convention. Characters like him.

In the first year of the new arrangement, he earned his 5,000 rubles, relying on the advice of noblemen with an avid interest in the theater when sorting out the season. Some of these noblemen operated private serf theaters and were no less keen to keep tabs on Maddox as he was on them. They approved the good and censored the bad—not just those works that offended etiquette, but also those whose actors failed to emote, or whose dancers botched the bourrée.

The government too stepped in. Alexander Prozorovsky, an arch-conservative, anti-Enlightenment figure, took a special interest in Maddox and his business dealings. He had been appointed governor general of Moscow in an effort to prevent a repeat, in imperial Russia, of the fall of the Bastille in Paris. The delights of his command of Moscow included book-burning parties, the suppression of occult groups and non-Orthodox religious sects, the Freemasons in particular, and the recruitment of spies to monitor the comings and goings of potential insurrectionists.

The Petrovsky fell outside of Prozorovsky’s control, which made Maddox a target of special investigation. The governor general sought to prove that Maddox had been negligent in fulfilling the duties granted him by the empress, and to negate the exclusive rights that remained in force despite his financial ruin. Confusion dominates his reports to Catherine, and to the noblemen’s club, as to whether Maddox’s exclusive rights terminated in 1791 or 1796. Maddox of course defended the latter date, but the proof the governor general demanded could not be found, neither in Maddox’s home nor in the files of Mikhaíl Volkonsky, the deceased governor general of Moscow, nor in police records. Maddox claimed that the papers granting him his privilege had mysteriously vanished. When pressed, he argued that the papers had been destroyed in the fire that had occurred back in February of 1780, in the three-sided wooden theater on Znamenka Street. Likewise next to nothing remained of the architectural plan, including the model, of the theater on Petrovka Street. The original architect, Christian Rosberg, informed the chief of police that Maddox had confiscated the model from him, but when the plan and model were demanded of him, by threat of force, all that Maddox managed to produce were the keys to a drawer filled with moldy, indecipherable scraps of paper. In the absence of documents legitimizing Maddox’s theatrical activities, the governor general ordered the chief of police to extract an affidavit from Maddox “to add to the file.”⁵⁰ The noblemen running Moscow under Prozorovsky blanched at the thought of buying Maddox out for 250,000 rubles, as he proposed.

Having failed to discredit Maddox, Prozorovsky resorted to extreme measures. He turned to the court with the unfounded allegation that Maddox’s house, which stood on the grounds of the Petrovsky Theater, had been built with embezzled funds. The petition failed, after which, with extreme malice, Prozorovsky directed the police to burn the house down, no questions asked. The order was not carried out. The denouement of the drama involved Prozorovsky ordering a punitive inspection of the theater and scolding Maddox for its deficiencies:

It is my duty to say that you ought to endeavor to keep said theater unsoiled and maintain in it plentiful heat and yet forestall any suffocating fumes … The hall in which you perform is riddled with a multitude of grave errors of architecture, though for this not you but the architect is at fault, and in so great a hall there is but one ingress and egress, and the only other way out is by means of a vile rope ladder. My predecessor had ordered an atrium to be erected, several years have passed, and yet you are not even thinking about it, and so I demand and assert that you must at all costs this coming summer raise that atrium, or else I will order your theater shut down until such time as it is built.⁵¹

In an attempt to deflect the criticism, Maddox reminded his antagonist of the good things that he had accomplished in his rotting theater, including the absorption of the school for thirty girls and boys and the promotion of the Russian repertoire. Prozorovsky changed the subject in response, shifting his invective from the sagging ceiling to the imperfect personnel:

It surpasses all understanding that your choir master is deaf, and that the German master of dancing in that ballet was lame, or else crooked-legged, and your ballet master is also old, as is his wife likewise, and no good as a teacher, for you have not a single student of either sex who would be at least tolerable in their dancing.⁵²

In January 1791 Maddox asked the Opekunskiy sovet to free him from his financial obligation to the orphanage (10 percent of the receipts), as a form of “compassion to the oppressed.”⁵³ The money would then be used to renovate the Petrovsky. The request was approved, but ultimately the matter rested with Betskoy. Maddox persisted, listing all of his services to the Moscow public: the building of the theater and its circular auditorium, the masquerades that he arranged in the Taganka Vauxhall, an investment of 100,000 rubles. The Russian (not Italian) ballets and operas that he produced needed to be taken into account, as well as their sets and costumes. The power brokers relented and, as a “good, humane deed,” bought out his exclusive rights for just over 100,000 rubles while also relieving him of his 10 percent financial commitment to the orphanage, which he had never actually honored.⁵⁴

Maddox’s strongest supporters were dead and gone, and the new generation ruling Moscow proved hostile to his endeavors. He had maneuvered from the start to secure the protection of the crown, and he needed it to survive. In the 1790s his theater fell entirely out of fashion, and he into disrepute. His merchant creditors persisted in their campaign to prosecute him and took the time away from feasting, praying, and abusing their wives to dictate a letter to their literate sons for submission to Nikolay Sheremetyev, the owner of a first-class serf theater who had married, to the shock of the aristocratic establishment, his leading lady. The language of the complaint, dated July 4, 1803, is ornate, stuffed with proverbs, Ryazan dialect, and biblical arcana in the service of invective. The merchants sought to reclaim the 90,000 rubles they were owed, and hoped for Sheremetyev’s assistance in imprisoning Maddox, since he had played them for fools for years, “twisting like a snake and a toad” to avoid his obligations, and leaving them “as helpless as crawfish in a shallow” when it came time to collect.⁵⁵ Moreover, he had insulted their bushy beards. Arson was not an option. If the Petrovsky was, God forbid, to burn down, the merchants would not recoup their losses. The 90,000 rubles Maddox owed to them—on top of the 250,000 he owed to the governing board—could not be gotten from Maddox’s candle and firewood suppliers, who were also victims of his cunning, nor could it be beaten out of the orphans in the troupe, who would protest, should extortion be attempted, that they had earned their wages through hard toil:

Verily is this Maddox the craftiest of all living beings, and back when we had not yet learned all his ways and taken full measure of his cunning—to wit, that he pays none of his debts and yet keeps putting away all the profit from the Theater into his own pocket on the sly—back then, while begging us for a reprieve in collecting a payment, would he bawl openly in front of us all, so much so that he could draw pity from stones. And what a master of trickery he is—you can be the smartest merchant in the world, and yet until you get to know him inside and out, he’ll fool you over and over. And towards the end, having dispossessed us of both our wares and our capital, he set off treating us in an impolitic way: in his house did he curse and shout at us, simpletons, solely for our asking for that which was due to us. “How dare you,” he says, “you beard-heads, set your foot in a house of a gentleman? Don’t you,” he says, “know that I, just like the local gentlemen here, carry a sword? And I am,” he says, “made as ever the master of the Theater for all perpetuity.” And so indeed we do believe that he is a man of magnitude, therefore, while all the local powers that be, may the Lord keep them in good health, we approach with no fear whatsoever, were we terrified to even think of showing ourselves before Maddox towards the end. For as it says in the Holy Scripture, “poverty doth humble a man,” and Maddox is nowadays so proud that no cat will want to sit in his lap, and there’s no sign that he is dwelling in poverty, but, he says, “I am only obliged to pay you one and a half thousand rubles a year; that,” he says, “is what it says in the paper that the governing board has. How dare you demand more from me?” And that’s his whole argument. Well, simple-minded as we are, we don’t buy that kind of reasoning and think to ourselves, “Was it not he himself who made it so that he only has to give us that much?” And so the trustees, in their kindness to us, did judge that “Maddox, as they say, is poorest of the poor, nothing more can be gotten from him, and it’s as good an end to a vile state of affairs as can be”—and thought that this would make us content. Will, now, Maddox succeed in having his way with us even here? For if he decided to pay us even one-and-a-half of ten thousand rubles a year, so we are certain as certain can be that the trustees would not hinder him in this but furthermore would commend him for dispensing with grace that which he gathered wickedly.⁵⁶

The merchants wanted Maddox to sit in jail until his attitude improved and he opened his purse. But it was not, in the end, in the interest of the governing board to deprive him of the chance to settle his debts with the orphanage. In terms of his finances, Maddox was as “naked as a falcon,” the governing board advised the merchants, but he had the backing of the crown and could not be touched.⁵⁷ Their desire to see him in a cold, damp prison cell, tormented by parasites, or sent on foot to Siberia, betrayed their ignorance of the perks of aristocratic relationships. Maddox knew these very well. Connecting the budget of his theater with that of the orphanage had shielded him from arrest, leaving his merchant creditors powerless. He would “dive to the bottom of hell” with the 90,000 rubles they had lent him, leaving their children with “no meat for their soup.”⁵⁸

By 1794, he was having trouble meeting payroll and found himself begging his stars to accept, in place of a salary, the chance to perform whatever and whenever they liked and keep a large percentage of the proceeds. The arrangement he made along these lines with Pyotr Plavilshchikov, a pudgy, doe-eyed actor committed to representing the plights of the lower ranks, was advertised in Moskovskiye vedomosti on December 13, 1794. “The performance is a benefit for M. Plavilshchikov, who receives no payment from the theater” and asks for “the indulgence of the esteemed public” in “flattering his hope” by attending.⁵⁹ He performed, then he quit, taking with him the conductor of the orchestra and leaving the public, which took the side of the actors over Maddox, disgusted.

The crisis deepened in the final year of Catherine the Great’s reign and the first years of her daughter-in-law’s rise to power as spouse of Tsar Paul I. Receiving word of the strife, the empress consort, Mariya, dispatched one of her spies to report on the Petrovsky.⁶⁰ The spy, Nikolay Maslov, wrote back three weeks later, on November 28, 1799, with a long list of calamities. He complained that the theater changed its shows so unpredictably that actors could not learn their lines in time. Their costumes were often ill kempt, or sometimes even performers simply wore street clothes. Plus the theater and dressing rooms were so frightfully cold that the performers often fell ill. “The management, all the while,” he continued, “rebukes them harshly.”⁶¹

Mariya expressed genuine surprise that the mistreated actors had not taken matters into their own hands and staged a hostile takeover of the theater. The Petrovsky had been bankrupt for at least three years, she realized. It had died along with her mother-in-law, Catherine the Great. Although Maddox announced business as usual in Moskovskiye vedomosti at the end of the official period of mourning for the empress, not even fireworks in the great rotunda could suppress the sad truth. He had nothing in the coffers, no one to clean the stage or bait the mousetraps, no coal to stoke or wood to burn. Still harboring the delusion that he might placate his nemesis, Prozorovsky, he had pledged to repair the theater and offered to heat it in advance of performances, rather than letting the rabble shiver in their stalls. He had also sought to increase receipts with a production of Pygmalion, an Ovid-derived melodrama about a sculptor who, having renounced the pleasures of the flesh, falls in love with one of his own creations. (The goddess Venus takes pity on him and brings the statue to life.) Maddox’s 1794 and 1796 performances of the drama, to sweet music by the Bohemian violinist Georg Benda, succeeded, but most of his other stagings of the period failed. The entire theatrical enterprise had fallen to pieces, and no one from the Moscow aristocratic establishment wanted to clean up the mess. Maddox sent a long letter to Mariya in 1802 in hopes that the orphanage would assume his debts and he would be allowed to retire from twenty-six years of service to Russian culture with his dignity intact. Following an audit that found both the theater and the orphanage awash in red ink, Mariya ordered the liquidation of Maddox’s estate.

The debts to the Opekunskiy sovet exceeded 300,000 rubles, which Tsar Paul, Mariya’s husband, absorbed on behalf of the crown. The Ryazan-Moscow boyars, for all their colorful invective, did not get their 90,000 rubles back.

The Petrovsky Theater closed, in ghastly fashion, on Sunday, October 8, 1805. At three o’clock, just before a performance of the popular mermaid spectacle Lesta, or the Dnepr Water Nymph, a spark became a flame, which became an inferno. The theater burned for the next three hours, a conflagration seen far and wide. The curious gawked; police, theater workers, and firemen milled helplessly around. The cause of the blaze was a subject of speculation. Two eyewitnesses, gentle people in their dotage, proposed that the Day of Judgment had at long last arrived for Maddox and his scandalsinged theater. Lesta was a benign thing, a comic opera that retold an old legend of a mermaid who pines for a prince, but the ladies in question thought it was demonic, a horror of the imagination that offended the Christians in the audience. God intervened before the curtain went up.

Most simply blamed the fire on carelessness in the cloakroom. Someone had knocked over a candle, setting the lining of a coat alight; his or her frantic efforts to stamp out the flames had failed. Such would have been typical of Maddox’s underpaid employees, the nobleman playwright Stepan Zhikharev explained, “the whole lot, each one being thicker-headed than the next.”⁶² Zhikharev watched from a distance: “We saw the enormous glow of a fire over Moscow and stood for a long time in bewilderment, wondering what could be burning so intensely. A postman coming from Moscow explained that the theater on Petrovka was on fire and that the fire brigade in all of its strength was unable to defend it.”⁶³

Maddox was done. He stayed in Moscow for a time, trolling the streets outside of his home in his familiar crimson cloak. There was talk of eviction, but the empress consort intervened to let him keep his house, instead of giving it to his actors. Eventually, he retired to the dacha and garden that he had bought years before, at the height of his powers, in the village of Popovka. He died there on September 27, 1822, at age seventy-five. His dancers and singers had become wards of the state and the Moscow division of the Imperial Theaters. Besides the remnants of Maddox’s troupe, the Imperial Theaters absorbed a serf theater with a staff of seventy-four as well as the French public theater operating in the city at the time. Maddox’s native Russian actors elegantly assured the empress consort that their pursuit of fame was not affected by “self-investment” but a desire to bring Russian theater to its “highest perfection.”⁶⁴ Even in its ruin, the forerunner of the Bolshoi staked its claim as a source of national pride. The ambitions—and the failures—of Maddox’s theater would also haunt the Bolshoi, which would likewise endure corrosive conflicts between the coldhearted management and the disloyal performers, succumb to government oversight, adjust the repertoire in search of audiences, struggle with stagecraft, and squander huge sums. And the theater would burn, repeatedly, but always be rebuilt.

Maddox retired without a title in the Table of Ranks, but with a generous pension of 3,000 rubles and “six horses to his carriage.”⁶⁵ Maddox and his wife, a woman of German aristocratic lineage, had, among their eleven children, a son with a stutter whom they turned out for bad behavior. The stutterer in question, Roman Maddox, became the greatest Russian adventurer of the nineteenth century. He spent a third of his life in prison or exile for swindling, assembled a militia of mountaineers against Napoleon’s troops, and, it was said, ravished more maidens than Casanova. Banished to Siberia, he conducted geological expeditions. The son’s exploits fueled anti-Semitic gossip about the father. The slander increased after his death. Without pretense to subtlety, one Soviet-era source claims that Maddox’s posthumous reputation ranges from a “prominent Englishman who was forced for political reasons to abandon his homeland” to a “thieving speculator and money-grubbing ‘Yid.’”⁶⁶

In the end, Maddox was no less an illusion than those he created.