Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today. Simon Morrison

of broad appeal, even to non-Russians; the best of the tunes are heard in the central devichnik scene, a kind of bachelorette party for the heroine. The music was put together by the violinist Mikhaíl Sokolovsky, who had been added to Maddox’s payroll as a favor to his wife and sister, both talented music-theatrical performers. The opera was a success, lasting much longer in the repertoire than the theater itself.

      But the fixes were cosmetic. The Znamenka was a firetrap, and Maddox complained about its flammable flimsiness in a letter to the governor general. Sure enough, “negligent lower servants who lived in the basement” sparked an inferno.¹⁹ The playhouse burned to the ground on February 26, 1780, during an unscheduled intermission in a performance of The False Dmitri, a play based on actual historical events in Russia (the cursed period of famine, usurpers, and impostors known as the Time of Troubles). The lead role was played by a court-educated thirty-six-year-old actor named Ivan Kaligraf, who supplemented the income he received from Maddox by giving acting lessons at the orphanage.

      Kaligraf, who had survived the bubonic plague in Moscow, perished after the fire. He caught a cold while attempting to douse the flames. The sniffle developed into pneumonia, and then fever of the brain. Moskovskiye vedomosti did not report his death and focused instead on the survival of the governor general, the brave servants who saved their masters, and the prompt actions of the police in preventing the blaze from spreading to nearby houses by sealing off the ends of the street. Had the fire spread, scores might have perished, since most of the dwellings in the area were nothing more than collections of tree trunks purchased at market.

      An entire article in Moskovskiye vedomosti was dedicated to the loss in the fire of a bejeweled chapeau, “on which was sewn instead of buttons a large ring of a single diamond with smaller diamonds sprinkled around.”²⁰ A hunting hat with diamond thread also vanished in the panicked flight from the theater, along with a pair of round earrings and “a silver buckle of gold and crystal.”²¹ A handsome reward was promised for the return of these items to their owner, an imperial senator. But the newspaper said not a word about the death of one of the best actors in the city.

      Urusov suffered a huge financial loss in the fire and was forced to surrender his share of the theater to Maddox for 28,550 rubles. Imperial officials offered to reassign Urusov’s rights to Maddox as long as the stone theater was finally built on Petrovka Street. Construction of the theater, the future Bolshoi, had not even begun when the Znamenka burned down. To see the project through to completion, Maddox needed to borrow a huge sum of 130,000 rubles while also settling the bill for the damage to the Vorontsov estate and continuing, per imperial decree, to supplement the budget of the orphanage. Since the fire had deprived him of income, he was forced to borrow repeatedly from the Opekunskiy sovet, the governing board, which was established under Catherine the Great for the care of orphans and widows, and whose activities included a pawnshop and a mortgage brokerage.

      Maddox had secured an architect for the project, Christian Rosberg, but progress was delayed owing to Rosberg’s health problems. In 1778, he suffered from “painful seizures” after being exposed to noxious fumes and had to surrender his position as a building inspector.²² It took Rosberg four years just to come up with a model for the theater. The pressure from Maddox’s creditors was intense. He turned the threat to his advantage by appealing to the highest power in the land, Catherine the Great, for assistance mobilizing a brigade of builders. Work proceeded apace, and the theater was completed by the end of 1780. Maddox was saved—at least for the moment. The governor general found himself obliged to instruct the police, in a disquieting memo from March 31, 1780, “to accord Maddox special reverence and respect and protect him from unpleasantness … Seeking to bestow pleasure on the public, he had traded all of his capital to construct a huge and magnificent theater and remained burdened by debt.”²³

      The plans for the theater survive, although most of the images only detail the exterior and surrounding structures. The theater had a single entrance and exit, with three stone staircases inside leading up to the parterre and the three tiers of loges; two wooden staircases led to the galleries above. Later a plank-covered mezzanine and a masquerade rotunda with elaborate garland moldings, portraits, and mirrors would be attached by corridor to the theater. The rough granite square at the front of the theater was on higher ground than the fuel-storage area in the back. Wooden buildings cramped the square to the right and left, spoiling the view of the theater from the distance and posing a fire risk. Maddox occupied one of these buildings; another perhaps served as his horse stable and carriage house. The statelier buildings on Petrovka were held by aristocratic clans. The artists of the theater slept in garrets and frequented the clammy, soiled Petrovka tavern. General Major Stepan Apraksin, destined to be a front-line commander in the war against Napoleon, occupied a residence farther up the street, not far from the carved stone façade, made to look like leaf and vine, of the Church of the Resurrection.

      The belief has always been that the Bolshoi Theater was built on the foundations of the Petrovsky, but urban archeology places them 136 to 168 feet apart—the Bolshoi being that much closer to the Kremlin. Much as with the Staatsoper and the old Kärntnertortheater in Vienna, Maddox’s stone block theater with slanted wooden roof did not titivate the skyline, but it was impressive for its time, rivaled only by the Senate Palace, the neoclassical building that now serves as the Kremlin residence of the Russian president, and Pashkov House, which became the first public museum in Moscow.

      For a description of the inside, there are the piecemeal recollections of the noblemen who attended the six-o’clock performances in the 1780s. From their carriages, which were parked by a watering point to the side of the theater, they ascended a torchlit central staircase past the parterre into their leased loges, 110 in all, and further ascended, during entr’actes, to a buffet of cold cuts catered, according to the records, by a Frenchman. Entrance to the parterre cost 1 ruble, the galleries 50 kopecks. The audience on the floor and in the rafters included bureaucrats, students, merchants, officers, and valets. Mention is made in the sources of commodes for the ladies. The ceiling of the theater was fashioned from canvas-covered planks that, to the dismay of those trying to listen, deadened the sound of the orchestra. Large wax and tallow candles in forty-two chandeliers illuminated the space and mixed an odor akin to singed hair with the smell of the patrons. The light was magnified by mirrors onstage and off; torch dances by masked male and female performers served as rough-and-ready spotlights; handheld candles in the audience were used to read programs. Underground were nooks for the dress- and wigmaker, rooms for making and storing props and panels, and practice spaces for the musicians. Even those who could read music sometimes learned their parts by rote, saving Maddox the cost of a copyist, paper, and ink. Coal stoves heated the theater and the masquerade rotunda.

      The hall was Maddox’s greatest pride and greatest expense. (Most of the loans he obtained from the Opekunskiy sovet went to its construction.) The Englishman Charles Hatchett, an amateur chemist and son of the imperial Russian coach maker, recalled Maddox boasting to him that the masquerade rotunda could hold 5,000 people. Hatchett was either mistaken in his recollection or referring to the number of people who could be accommodated in Moscow’s public gardens, which had entertainments of their own. Or perhaps Maddox was simply exaggerating. In truth, the rotunda could hold 2,000 people, excluding the musicians in the rafters, and the theater itself no more than 900. Hatchett further observed that, no matter the size of the crowd, the well-heeled in the loges could preserve their privacy: “The boxes had veils of light silk to draw before the front so that those in them may be seen or not at their pleasure.”²⁴

      Maddox pampered the elite, his season-pass holders, with coal heat and fashion brochures, and he invited them to rent their loges in advance so that they might “decorate them as they saw fit.”²⁵ The seating plan recalled a chessboard, with the queens and bishops stacked at the back, and the pawns, the single-ticket holders, gathered before them. The participants in the masquerades, in contrast, tended to be “idlers and spendthrifts” looking for fun, and “gentry seeking grooms for their daughters.”²⁶ The decadence and occasional tawdriness of the masquerades added to the allure of Maddox’s theater and inspired a grisly tale of fiction, “Concert of Demons,” whose hero, a former asylum inmate, suffers a psychotic episode in the Petrovsky. Sparks fall from the stars onto the roof of the