Maddox also clashed with the xenophobic commander of Moscow, and with a powerful politician who had opened a theater of his own on the grounds of the Imperatorskiy Vospitatel’nïy dom, the Imperial Foundling Home. Once that territorial dispute was resolved, Maddox came to depend on the talented children of the orphanage to dance in his ballets and sing in his operas. For ever after, Moscow had its theater, and the theater had its school.
THE MOSCOW THAT Maddox made home was harsh, a city of tanneries and slaughterhouses, altogether lacking the stern neoclassical grace of St. Petersburg. Fires presented the greatest hazard, since most of the non-government buildings, including the churches, were made of wood. The dead were also a problem. The bubonic plague of 1771 felled a third of the population, including two of Maddox’s potential rivals for control of theatrical entertainments in the city. (At the time, the core of Moscow comprised the area between the white defensive walls of the Kremlin and the outer ditch, gates, and ramparts—what became, by the end of the eighteenth century, the Boulevard Ring.) Cemeteries, like factories, crowded the center until Catherine the Great ordered them relocated beyond the ramparts into the artisan suburbs. The empress disdained Moscow: “besides sickness and fires there is much stupidity there,” which recalled “the beards” of the boyars who had ruled it before her time.13 She and her courtiers invaded the Kremlin for her no-expense-spared coronation, but she otherwise kept her distance. Compared to St. Petersburg, the imperial capital on the Gulf of Finland, thirteen postal stations north, Moscow was dissolute, depraved. Upon recognizing that it needed her divine intervention, Catherine drained the swamp, literally, by ordering the encasement of the tributaries of the Moscow River in subterranean pipes. The empress was benevolent when convenient, repressive when required. She quashed the revolt of 1773, for example, but counseled compassion when it came to the execution of the rebels, whose ranks included peasants, former convicts, religious dissenters, and Cossacks. Torture was discouraged, as was the public display of corpses. But such decorum was not extended to the leader of the rebels, Yemelyan Pugachev. He was hauled to Moscow from Kazakhstan in a metal cage, then decapitated and dismembered in Bolotnaya Square.
Prussian by birth, Catherine ascended to the throne in 1762 after securing the arrest of her puerile husband, Peter III. He had ruled Russia for just half a year, enacting a series of halfhearted reforms that aided the poor but offended the lower noble ranks. They forced him to abdicate, after which he was placed under house arrest in his manor in Ropsha. Catherine allowed him to keep his servant, dog, and violin, but not his lover. In July 1762, he died, cause unknown. Alexei Orlov, the coup-plotting brother of Catherine’s own lover, blamed Peter’s death on a drunken quarrel with his guards. Catherine attributed his demise to cowardice. “His heart was excessively small, and also dried up,” she recalled, after ordering his bruised corpse opened up.14 She described the day she became empress (before her husband’s death) with more warmth:
I was almost alone at Peterhof [Palace], amongst my women, seemingly forgotten by everyone. My days, however, were much disturbed, for I was regularly informed of all that was plotting both for and against me. At six o’clock on the morning of the 28th, Alexei Orlov entered my room, awoke me, and said very quietly, “It is time to get up; everything is prepared for proclaiming you.” I asked for details. He replied, “Pacik [Peter III] has been arrested.” I no longer hesitated, but dressed hastily, without waiting to make my toilet, and entered the carriage which he had brought with him.15
As empress, Catherine rose at dawn to attend to affairs of state, ensuring that meetings did not exceed the five-minute span Maddox would represent in his clock. She maintained a discreet but adventurous love life; the goings-on in her bedchamber later prompted ludicrous Soviet-era gossip about decadent sexual practices, including bestiality. Official records reveal that she overhauled the Russian legal system, pushed the boundaries of the empire westward, and ordered the construction of more than a hundred towns in eleven provinces. Besides the establishment of the Imperial Foundling Home, her educational reforms in Moscow included the opening of two gymnasia under the aegis of Moscow University. The first of these was for the sons and daughters of noblemen, the second for the sons and daughters of commoners. Some of Maddox’s eleven children attended the latter.
TO OPERATE HIS THEATER, Maddox needed a partner from the upper noble ranks. He found it in the Moscow provincial prosecutor, Prince Pyotr Urusov. Among the prince’s duties was overseeing the masquerades, fairground booths, strongmen, and trained bears of Moscow. In March 1776, the governor general of Moscow, Mikhaíl Volkonsky, granted the prince a decade-long exclusive permit for theatrical presentations. Urusov had earlier collaborated with an Italian impresario, Melchiore Groti, but the relationship soured, and Groti vanished “to God knows where” with the costumes and the salaries owed to the staff.16 The municipal police could not catch him. Maddox came to Urusov’s rescue, convincing him of the financial and logistical benefits of a partnership while also mesmerizing him with visions of fantastic spectacles to be staged in dedicated spaces. Since there was no shortage of unemployed professional actors in Moscow, neither Urusov nor Maddox thought to enlist amateur talent—namely, the girls and boys who were being taught four hours per day, four days per week, on the grounds of the Imperial Foundling Home. The actors from the bankrupt Moscow Public Theater would suffice, along with some serfs.
On August 31, 1776, Urusov and Maddox formalized their relationship. The contract between them was certified by the police and survives in the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts. It runs just four lines, the first reaffirming Urusov’s ten-year monopoly, after which, in 1786, Maddox would be granted a ten-year monopoly of his own. Tucked into the mix was the unusual detail that Maddox was to provide 3,100 rubles a year to the Imperial Foundling Home. His contribution to the drama and music school on its grounds did not mean, at the time, that he could exploit the talents of the orphans. That was a later development that would arise when he fulfilled the last stipulation in the agreement with Urusov: the construction, by 1781, of a proper theater in Moscow. Advertised as entertainment for the entire nation, the theater was to be built of stone and surrounded by a moat for the prevention of fires. Its “accessories” were at once to pamper its patrons and improve the skyline.17
MADDOX AND URUSOV acquired a parcel of land on an ancient thoroughfare in central Moscow. It had once served as the home of lance- and spear-makers, hence the name of one of the cathedrals that dominated the neighborhood: the Cathedral of the Transfiguration on the Spear. The plot was on Petrovka Street, parallel to the half-finished underground tunnel that would, following its completion in 1792, guide water from the north of the city into the Moscow River along what is now Neglinnaya Street. The water had once wrapped itself around the Kremlin, serving as a natural defense against invaders to the east.
Before the theater on Petrovka Street was built, Maddox and Urusov arranged performances on Znamenka Street, in a theater located on an estate belonging to Roman Vorontsov. During the summer Maddox also began to organize Sunday concerts and fireworks in the public gardens on the southern outskirts of Moscow. Admission through the covered entrance into the gardens, which Maddox modeled along the lines of the London Vauxhall, was 1 ruble or 2, depending on whether the visitor sat for tea in the rotunda. The Italian theater manager Count Carlo Brentano de Grianti was charmed by the place when he visited in the 1790s, but since the gardens appealed to tradesmen—cobblers, hatters, and corset-makers—the upper ranks kept their distance. Grianti’s description of the gardens is briefer than his accounts of the passions of Russian countesses, Siberian gems, gambling at the English Club, and masked balls at the court of Catherine the Great. But he finds room to mention the great “profit” that “the theater entrepreneur M. Maddox” made in the gardens on holidays.18
Maddox sank some of that profit into the Znamenka playhouse, renovating it in time for the premiere of the Russian comic opera The Miller Who Was Also a Magician, a Swindler, and a Matchmaker (Mel’nik—koldun, obmanshchik