Both the inside and outside of the theater inspired, and were inspired by, national pride. An unsigned article in Moskovskiye vedomosti heaps praise on the theater and on Moscow, the rebuilt symbol of “the sword of victory,” ready to join the ranks of the great world cities.22
The swiftness and grandeur of certain recent events in Russia have astonished our contemporaries and will be perceived as nothing less than miracles in distant posterity … Our fatherland draws closer to the great European powers with each achievement. Such a thought arises within the soul of the patriot at the appearance of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater, whose walls have risen, like a phoenix, in new splendor and magnificence from the ruins. For how long in this place has the eye been exposed to the foul heaps, the remains of horrendous disaster, and the ear to the thumping of the worker’s hammer? And now to capture the delighted gaze is a splendid building, an edifice of enchanting taste in height, immensity, and noble simplicity, coupled with elegance, stateliness, and ease. And now the inner walls receive the thunder of the muses; positive inspiration for humanity! Such is the magnitude, in spirit and deed, of Russia’s government.
Unlike Maddox’s catch-as-catch-can song-and-dance operation, the grand space was conceived from the start as a cathedral to the finest of the fine arts, one that placed the mercantile middle classes and the inhabitants of the Table of Ranks side by side “on the path to Enlightenment.”
The nineteen-year-old poet Mikhaíl Lermontov celebrated the construction of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater in similarly lavish terms. In his “Panorama Moskvï” (Panorama of Moscow), a meditation on the walls, roofs, and boulevards of the city, he imagined the god Apollo, whose alabaster statue topped the portico of the Bolshoi, glaring at the crenelated Kremlin walls from his chariot, upset that “Russia’s ancient and sacred monuments” were hidden from view.23 Those monuments had been seriously damaged in 1812, after Napoleon ordered the Kremlin detonated and soldiers looted the decorative insignia and ornaments. Tsar Alexander I commissioned the repairs in a neo-Gothic style, and his successor, Tsar Nicholas I, saw them through. The Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater, in contrast, struck a neoclassical pose: symmetrical, monumental, and harmonious.
The theater opened on January 6, 1825, with a benediction and an allegorical prologue featuring Apollo and his muses. Then “a soothsayer from a mythological world” predicted the nation’s future, the triumphs to come. There was also an affirmation of the vastness of the Russian Empire, the terrain it occupied from Poland to the Caspian Sea, from “the mists of Finland” to the “cloud ridges” of the “formidable Caucasus.” Bové, the hero of the moment (Mikhaílov was all but forgotten), heard well-earned bravos from the stage. Following the six p.m. opening performance, at eleven p.m. the theater hosted its first masquerade. It was meant to be an elegant occasion; patrons were told not to bring hats or “indecent masks” into the theater.24
The opening of the theater brought the peregrinations, if not the hardscrabble existence, of Moscow’s performers to an end. There remained the challenge of learning multiple roles for multiple short-lived stagings. Some were made in Russia, others freely imported, in the absence of copyright protection, from Europe. The first years featured burlesque comedies and benefits for individual dancers and singers, but Pushkin also made his presence felt (as source for the ballets Ruslan and Lyudmila, Prisoner of the Caucasus, and The Black Shawl), likewise Cervantes (Don Quixote) and Goethe (Faust). Preternatural fare put the fabulous machines of the stage to good use. The repertoire included a balletic version of Cinderella, the beloved seventeenth-century folktale about an abused and overworked maidservant who becomes, via a magical helper and friendly critters, the sparkling bride of a prince. It was choreographed for the 1825 opening of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater by the twenty-year-old ballerina Félicité Hullen to existing music by her middle-aged husband, Fernando Sor. She was Parisian and he was from Barcelona, but they both ended up in Moscow in the employment of the Imperial Theaters. Their marriage did not last.
Sor’s career in Moscow spanned three years. He composed other ballet scores, but is best known for his guitar pieces: studies, sets of themes and variations, transcriptions of songs, and sonatas. The music is discreet, polite, and much indebted to Mozart. Hullen was brasher, flashier. She was mentored in Moscow by Glushkovsky, who promoted her talents as a ballerina and then made her his partner as ballet master at the Bolshoi and pedagogue at the Imperial Theater College. She became Russia’s first female choreographer, and included Russian dances in ballets on Russian themes. Like Glushkovsky, Hullen distinguished herself in Moscow by producing comic works on peasant themes that would never have been staged in St. Petersburg, for reasons as much aesthetic as political. Yet Hullen still privileged the repertoire that she had performed as a young dancer in Paris, fueling the criticism from one of the administrators of the Imperial Theaters that she was pushing Russian ballet back in time when it needed to move forward. She serviced her debt to her homeland by introducing features of French Romanticism to Russian ballet. The amalgam she created—of the local and international, from the land, of the ether—helped distinguish ballet in Moscow as something different, something distinct from what was staged in St. Petersburg and throughout Europe.
Hullen’s and Sor’s Cinderella, which was premiered at the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater during its inaugural season, exemplifies her particular mix of European and Russian influences as well as the distinctive qualities of ballet as revived in Moscow. The familiar European story is clothed in distinctly Russian garb to off er much more than a lesson in protracted courtship or even a tale of personal transformation, whether on the surface, through the heroine’s donning a ball gown and glass slippers, or, more deeply, as she learns to distinguish good from evil. Instead, audiences in Moscow (no strangers to cinders) were accustomed to patriotic sentiments being tucked into ballets and operas, so could interpret Cinderella, at least in part, as a parable of national striving. No longer revealing a girl’s poetic isolation, the ballet now featured Mother Russia as the heroine unwilling to be a maidservant to Europe. Her years of neglect and disrespect had come to an end through the expulsion of Napoleon. The heroes of the war, including the governor general of Moscow, Golitsïn, vie for the role of the prince, and the ball is set in the Russian imperial court. The big new theater also infused the modest folktale with potent grandeur.
The ballets by Valberg, Glushkovsky, and Hullen mark the emergence of a Russianness that would define the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater for the twenty-eight years of its existence—and not only in ballet. The Bolshoi was (and is) also an opera house, and this same search for Russianness is found in the operas of Mikhaíl Glinka, who was immortalized even before his death as the father figure of the Russian musical tradition. Whereas the choreographers at the Bolshoi made their dances seem Russian by manipulating models from France and Italy, Glinka and his successors relied on exoticisms taken, more often than not, from points to the east. Archaic scales and scale segments came to define Russianness in Russian music, along with invented scales like the whole-tone and the octatonic, church bells, drawn-out lamentations, and, in opera, text settings sensitive to the accents and stresses of the Russian language. Most of these musical novelties were invented, including the tunes supposedly borrowed from the peasants. But by concocting them they became more affecting and alluring, more seductive both to audiences at home and abroad.
Glinka came from a village near Smolensk, but he was cosmopolitan in mind-set, spending as much time outside of Russia as inside. He learned music in Europe and died in Berlin. His first opera, the pro-Russian, anti-Polish A Life for the Tsar (Zhizn’ za tsarya, 1836) was nonetheless feted as a model nationalist score. (In the Soviet period in particular, it received the blessing of nationalist ideologues, though not before the libretto had been rewritten, to exclude the tsar.) Glinka’s second opera, Ruslan and Lyudmila (1842), did