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