Real or imagined, the success of Glinka’s Russianness was the bane of the existence of his less skilled, less well-trained peers. Among the more resentful of them was Alexei Verstovsky, a prolific composer as well as a central figure in the operations of the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theater. He composed music for the theater, but his legacy rests on his administrative contributions. His career overlaps with Glinka’s and picks up where Glushkovsky’s leaves off.
VERSTOVSKY (1799–1862) WAS of modest noble lineage and grew up listening to the subpar serf orchestra on his father’s land in southeast Russia. He trained as an engineer in St. Petersburg but cared much more about his chief hobby: music. He studied singing, took violin lessons, and realized accompaniments at the keyboard. Engineering bored him, so he decided to offend his father by becoming a part-time composer, an occupation that even he thought beneath his station. Verstovsky’s first substantial composition, a vaudeville called Grandma’s Parrots (Babushkinï popugai, 1819), set a low aesthetic bar. His technique improved thanks to lessons with, among others, the great Italian opera composer Gioachino Rossini. (Legend has it that Rossini gave these lessons to Verstovsky only after Verstovsky agreed to settle his gambling debts.) Patrons of the Bolshoi Theater flocked to see Verstovsky’s Slavonic devil opera, Pan Twardowski, but it was ridiculed by operagoers in St. Petersburg for its vacuousness and two-dimensional characterizations. It also paraphrased the scariest pages in Carl Maria von Weber’s German devil opera, Der Freischütz.
Verstovsky found greater success with a clever blend of love songs, horror effects, and comic minstrel tunes entitled Askold’s Tomb (Askol’dova mogila, 1835). Set in the ancient days of Kievan Rus, the opera involves two lovers, a witch, and an unnamed character seen lurking, in the first act, around the grave of a pagan prince. Dark forces keep the lovers apart, but the witch ensures the rescue of the heroine and her reunion with the hero through some well-timed spells cast around a cauldron, with black cat and owl looking on. The unnamed character helps as well, but ends up drowning in the River Dnieper. Askold’s Tomb played to nationalist sentiments both on the level of Russian medieval plot and archaic musical elocution, and it received hundreds of performances in Moscow and St. Petersburg, becoming arguably the most popular Russian opera of the nineteenth century. Even after it was dropped from the repertoire, the dances survived (Verstovsky joked about the dancers taking them to their graves). Had Glinka not come along with his canonic Russian operas, Verstovsky might be regarded as a central figure in Russian music history. He ended up in the margins.
His failure to top the success of Askold’s Tomb left him bitter, especially after the ascent of Glinka. Jealous, he grumbled that Glinka’s 1836 opera, A Life for the Tsar, failed as a piece of drama: “One does not go to the theater for the purpose of praying to God,” he declared in the middle of his hotheaded critique.25 Verstovsky thought of himself as the greater pioneer, but was stymied in his pursuit of fame, and thus laid down his pen, becoming a bureaucrat and politician. Positioning himself in the right place at the right time, Verstovsky toadied up to people in power so as to move up the bureaucratic ladder of the Moscow Imperial Theaters from music inspector to cast and crew inspector and then to repertoire inspector. Eventually he took over the Moscow directorate altogether.
The image that emerges from his employment records is that of a poor gentleman who constructed an administrative career for himself from scratch with no great successes or failures. Despite never loving his work, he was unable to devote himself to leisure for financial and social reasons. On the other hand, his letters reveal a much more vivid persona, bordering at times on the outrageous. He comes across as a jolly good fellow, a lover of gossip (about brides and the doddering “old mushrooms” in the civil service), teasing, and outrageous puns.26 His pen and his tongue could be cruel, however, and he did not hold back when deriding critics and censors and all of the other people who had crossed him. He wrote in extreme haste but fluidly, especially when he vented spleen about his various peeves. These included same-sex relationships. In his letters from the late 1830s, he mocks the effeminate manners of male dancers, some openly homosexual, others not, by using feminine endings and misspellings to describe their behavior: “A new dancer has come to us in the theater with the grandest of pretensions; I don’t like him and most of our decent people agree with me entirely. Most of all I don’t like his girlish ways. He prances around as if to say ‘I’m sooo tired!’ ‘I daaanced until I practically faaainted on the stage!’”27 Verstovsky could not help but wag his caustic tongue about the perceived lesbianism of the ladies in his circle as well: “The former actress Semyonova and Princess Gagarina have the most passionate correspondence, one can’t live without the other—it’s magical, simply magical!”28 His letters often include strange drawings altogether unrelated to the subjects under discussion: a chap with a rooster’s comb bowing like an ape to a baroness; a Chinese man with an umbrella riding an elephant; the pope baptizing three babies in a pot.
The group of nobles running the theaters of Moscow and St. Petersburg was small and tight-knit. The librettist of Verstovsky’s opera Askold’s Tomb, Mikhaíl Zagoskin, was director of the Moscow Imperial Theaters from 1837 to 1841. Soon Verstovsky agitated to replace Zagoskin, pledging “to repair all of the cracks in the directorate” that had appeared under his leadership.29 The largest, he complained, had been created by the choreographer Hullen, who was not, in his opinion, a progressive force at the Bolshoi but someone who had “pushed things back by five years, goaded by Zagoskin, and completely destroyed the ballet company. Many fine dancers dispersed and those who stayed were spoiled.”30 The slander did not, however, help him to get the job, at least not immediately. He continued to report to the governor general of Moscow, Dmitri Golitsïn. Thus he was required to attend parties at Golitsïn’s home, which he found tiresome, “more like dusks than evenings,” and worse than the enervating occasions at the English Club that rounded out his social calendar. The older “bastards” at the parties “pranced like cranes”; the bearded, “greasy” youth put on a dissatisfied affect, pretending that they had better places to be.31 The social scene improved when the sovereign visited Moscow, at which time the city became like an “excavated anthill,” everywhere “busybodies sweeping and repairing,” “beards getting trimmed, moustaches already shaved, everyone cleaned up and sobered up!”32
Zagoskin was replaced, first by Alexander Vasiltsovsky, an anxious, humble individual much prone, in his letters to the court, to protestations of worthlessness. Finally, after Vasiltsovsky took sick and could no longer fulfill his duties, Verstovsky assumed the directorship of the kontora of the Moscow Imperial Theaters. He served in the position from 1848 until his own retirement in 1861, a year before he died. He did not like Moscow; its provincialism was not a virtue. But as he confessed at the start of his administrative ascent, “the grace of expected rewards” kept him there. Certainly he was able to reward himself by keeping his opera Askold’s Tomb in the repertoire. And when the management structure of the Bolshoi shifted, returning control from Moscow to St. Petersburg, Verstovsky gladly cast himself in the role of a dedicated public servant and hands-on reformer.33
Throughout the nineteenth century, the directorate of the Moscow Imperial Theaters reported to the directorate of the St. Petersburg Imperial Theaters—except between 1822 and 1841, when the Bolshoi and Malïy Theaters were overseen by the governor general of Moscow and the Opekunskiy sovet, the governing board of the Imperial Foundling Home and its bank, to which the Moscow theaters still owed money from the Maddox era. After 1842 the administration of the Bolshoi and Malïy Theaters resembled that of the main theaters in St. Petersburg. Repertoire was reviewed by the (initially) three-member Censorship Committee established within the Ministry of Education in 1804, and budgets were set by the State Treasury of the Ministry of Finance—all under the supervision of the Ministry of the Imperial Court and His Majesty the Emperor. Control of the Bolshoi and the Malïy Theaters reverted to St. Petersburg in 1842, when the elderly Golitsïn’s health began its final decline.
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