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.