Its completion had been slow. Ivan Valberg (Val’berkh), the first famous native Russian ballet master, was told that it would be finished at the start of 1808, but work didn’t even begin until almost Easter. As he grumbled to his wife, “The theater is not done and the pettiness of the intrigues endless. There are no costumes, no sets; the conditions, in a word, are those of a fairground booth.” Valberg found the “squabbling between the sub-directors, actors, dancers, dressmakers, and assorted riff-raff” tiresome and came to regret coming to Moscow from St. Petersburg, where he had held a comfortable position at court.4
Most of what is known about the Imperial Arbat Theater is filtered through fictional novels and stories. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace includes a scene in which seventeen-year-old heroine Natasha Rostova, having just been humiliated by her fiancé’s father and sister, goes to the opera; she is joined by the socially ambitious and sexually alluring Hélène. At first the fakery of the opera seems all too apparent and fails to impress. But Natasha, needing to lose herself in fantasy, falls under its spell. “She did not remember who she was or where she was or what was happening before her. She looked and thought, and the strangest thoughts flashed through her head unexpectedly, without connection. Now the thought came to her of jumping up to the footlights and singing the aria the actress was singing, then she wanted to touch a little old man who was sitting not far away with her fan, then to lean over to Hélène and tickle her.”5 The opera itself goes unnamed but is generally assumed to be an anachronistic combination of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable and Gounod’s Faust.
The references to ballet in War and Peace are also indistinct (Tolstoy disapproved of twirling naked legs as much as he did stout prima-donna singers). Natasha refers to the dancer and ballet master Louis Duport, who performed in St. Petersburg and Moscow between 1808 and 1812, adhering, with majestic bearing, to the strictures of the French classical style. In the novel, Duport symbolizes the French influence on Russian aristocratic life, soon to be shattered by the Napoleonic Wars. It was an accurate depiction of the historical reality: War destroyed the Imperial Arbat Theater, razing it four years after it opened. The last event, on August 30, 1812, was a masquerade ball augmented by a mazurka quadrille performed by students.
War would also transform Valberg’s career. “When Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée marched into Russia,” he “became the choreographer of the hour.”6 Valberg’s transformation can be traced through his portraits. One likeness presents him as a curious man of letters: hair tousled, eyebrow cocked, a hint of St. Petersburg’s spires in the background. Another has him looking remote and austere, with bleached skin, pale eyes, and a thin wig pulling back his scalp. The latter is the appearance he cultivated in Moscow as a mature artist, a Russian cultural patriot.
Valberg had begun his career in St. Petersburg, teaching in the theater school there from 1794 to 1801. For a brief period within that span, by capricious decree of Tsar Paul I, men could teach ballets but were not allowed to perform in them. Shoelaces and social dances were likewise banned. The tsar loved rigid drill and martinet discipline and believed that dancers, female dancers, should be more like soldiers—that is, less delicate and more violent in their movements. Ironically, he met his end at the hands of violent soldiers. A cabal of drunken officers confronted him in his residence, pulling him out from behind a curtain and demanding his abdication. When he refused, he was strangled. Few tears were shed in the Imperial Theaters after Paul’s assassination. Men returned to the ballet, and the waltz returned to the court.
In 1801, following the ascension of Tsar Alexander I, Valberg traveled to Paris to improve his technique. Charles-Louis Didelot replaced him as pedagogue, raising standards in the corps de ballet and working to make Russian-born talent into “stars.”7 Didelot’s officially sanctioned reforms included creating a middle tier of character dancers, or coryphées, between the corps de ballet and the first dancers. He eliminated the “steeplechasers” from the roster of the imperial ballet and replaced them with performers who possessed supple limbs and expressive faces.8 Ballet historian Yuriy Bakhrushin credited Didelot with putting dancers in flexible, heelless slippers and sandals suggesting “Ancient Greece.”9 Out went the buckle shoes of the past, along with the wigs and rigid frocks that had limited the dancers’ movements. Didelot established a strict training regimen and was known as a zealous taskmaster, albeit one with a kind heart and a gentle touch. Both men and women were taught entrechats and battements, and proper posture was enforced in the classroom through taps to the legs and backs with the baton used to count time. Bruises and loving pats on the head were the measure of a dancer’s promise.
One of his most famous disciples, Yevgeniya Kolosova, had first been a student of Valberg’s. Her physical expression was considered more nuanced, more natural, than speech. The ballets Didelot conceived for her were lavish productions with elaborate scenarios drawn from a conflation of pseudohistorical sources. He found his ideas in books on history and mythology, which he took to the studio in the afternoons. More than one of his plots pivoted around the rescue of the hero or heroine from boulder-throwing, earthquake-generating brutes. Didelot was also fond of Cupid and virgin sacrifices, and dabbled, toward the end of his career, in Orientalism. He liked to assign himself the roles of powerful gods, in defiance of his skeletal frame and oversized nose.
To simulate great windstorms, Didelot made his dancers flap their arms until dizzy and faint. To suggest spiritual flight, he came up with the idea of suspending dancers from wires and had his technicians raise and lower them with blocks and ropes. Didelot scorned gravity in various other ways. For his 1809 ballet Psyché et l’amour, a demon flew up from the depths of the stage and sailed, torch in hand, over the heads of spectators. Venus was once carried into the clouds in a chariot pulled by fifty live doves. Biographer Mary Grace Swift happily ignores the likely carnage: “It is interesting to imagine the care that had to be taken to harness each dove with its little corselet, which was then attached to wires guiding each bird.”10
In 1811, Didelot was forced out, placed on a leave of absence for what the administration of the Imperial Theaters billed as ill health. In truth, a series of personal disputes resulted in the nonrenewal of his contract. Back from Paris, Valberg took over his overlapping responsibilities as imperial ballet master, choreographer, and pedagogue. The thirty-seven ballets that Valberg himself created combined the feet placements and body alignments associated with the French style and the technical displays of Italian entertainers. Val-berg also tapped into his humble origins (his father was a tailor) for creative material. One of his earlier ballets, from 1799, is set on the streets and in the salons of Moscow. A man from the lower ranks loves an aristocratic woman, and passion defeats reason with disastrous results. Although it deeply affected the audience, Valberg was rebuked by the cognoscenti for using modern-day costumes. “Oh! How the wise men and know-it-alls rose up against me! How, they asked, could a ballet be danced in tail-coats!” he remembered of the fracas.11 He subsequently produced a series of fantastic ballets and several domestic dramas that served the cause of moral and ethical enlightenment. In one, a girl named Klara must be educated in the rewards of virtue; another ballet teaches an American heroine the price of betrayal.
Valberg came into his own, and distinguished himself from Didelot, with a folk-dance-based divertissement about a Cossack maiden who, disguised as a man, becomes a heroic chevalier. Following its successful performance in St. Petersburg, Valberg took it to Moscow. There followed a series of pieces that combined dances, songs, and dramatic dialogues expressing love for Russian peasants and the sacred soil on which they toiled and for which they would fight. Gone were the pixies, sprites, and chariots of the gods; in came peasants, soldiers, and peasants-turned-soldiers. The choreographic dimension was reduced, but the overall popular appeal increased. The most significant of these divertissements dates from the height of Napoleon’s invasion. Just four days after the pivotal Battle of Borodino, which left both the French and Russian armies depleted and out of position, Valberg staged Love for the Fatherland (Lyubov’ k