The author of the 1834 tale, Mikhaíl Zagoskin, claimed, in tribute to Maddox, that it was based on actual events.
MADDOX’S INITIAL BUDGET for performers was just under 23,000 rubles, with the cost of operating the theater and the masquerade rotunda, including the salaries paid to the doctor, the coal stoker, and the hairdresser and wigmaker coming to 28,500 rubles. His roster included thirteen actors, seven actresses, and a dozen musicians. There were also seven dancers, three male, four female, who were denied room and board, and who earned pittances: 72 rubles a season in the case of the least-skilled ballerina. His lead actors came from a playhouse that had operated in Moscow in the 1760s under the direction of the composer Nikolay Titov. Nadezhda Kaligraf, widow of Ivan, earned a modest 600 rubles a season for delivering lines such as the following from the German bourgeois tragedy Miss Sara Sampson: “A short disappearance with a lover is a stain, it is true; but still a stain which time effaces. In some time, all will be forgotten, and for a rich heiress there are always men to be found, who are not so scrupulous.”29 She parried onstage with Vasiliy Pomerantsev, a subtle Shakespearean actor much coveted by Maddox’s rivals—those upper nobles who conspired to pry his exclusive rights away from him. Pomerantsev earned a proper 2,000 rubles for up to a hundred performances a year and did not mind his employer insisting that his lines not be cued from the wings or through a hole in the front of the stage.
The theater opened its doors on the eve of New Year’s Eve, December 30, 1780, with a dramatic prologue that extolled not Catherine the Great, as would have been de rigueur in the Imperial Theaters, but Maddox himself. The deities of the arts, Momus and Thalia, are cast out of Moscow when their theater burns down but return incognito aided by other mythological celebrities. A chorus greets them at the entrance to the theater on Petrovka to proclaim the end of their suffering in a boring, unfree world without art. The prologue pokes at the ulcer of theatrical censorship while also boasting of Maddox’s talents as entertainer. It was written by the satirist Alexander Ablesimov, the librettist of The Miller Who Was Also a Magician, a Swindler, and a Matchmaker, the comic opera that stood as Maddox’s biggest success to date. It was a step up from the witty fables that Ablesimov spent most of his time writing.
Next on the program was a presumably recycled, quickly stitched-together piece of pantomime and dance called L’école enchantée, or The Magic School. Little is known about it beyond a playbill listing the dramatis personae and the names of the ballet master, costumer, designer, and five lead performers. The masks, silks, panels, and screens are long lost. As was typical of ballets at the time, characters came from myth, and their gestures were perhaps derived from picture books, illustrated tales of the ancient world. The inclusion of the magician Mercurius, god of eloquence and commerce in L’école enchantée, suggests that it was intended as an allegorical illustration of Maddox’s illusion-filled career.
The music, also lost, came from the quill and inkpot of Josef Starzer, an industrious, well-connected Viennese composer credited with dozens of ballets. His collaborations with the influential ballet master Jean-Georges Noverre enhanced his international reputation, as did the itinerant dancers who spread his music around. Starzer fraternized at the Russian court with the Austrian dancer Leopold Paradis, who performed in St. Petersburg for almost two decades before getting a teaching position in Moscow at the Imperial Foundling Home. There Paradis taught classes of fifteen girls and fifteen boys on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from nine to noon, casting them in “sérieux,” “demi-caractère,” and “grotesque” roles based on their faces, not their feet.30 His agreement with the Foundling Home required him to set a new ballet every other year on his students, while also providing instruction in traditional partnered social dances: Polish minuets and contra dances. Those students with natural talent and true zeal were given extra training. The curriculum lasted three years, with an exam after the first year deciding whether students had sufficient suppleness to proceed. Those who flunked were immediately replaced, since Paradis built his entire pedagogical method on classes of thirty.
Paradis was paid 2,000 rubles a year by the orphanage and given a housing, firewood, and candle allowance of another 200 rubles (he had requested 300). He was old-fashioned enough for the orphanage to want him dismissed, but its overseer in St. Petersburg was unwilling to compensate him for the termination of his contract and approve the appointment of a new teacher, so he was kept on the payroll. Meantime, Paradis was involved in a dispute with a former employer in St. Petersburg over wages owed. No one was happy, and complaints flew back and forth on luxury paper bearing florid signatures.
Sixteen of the children in Paradis’s class danced in L’école enchantée. Their names are not included on the surviving playbill. The names of the adult dancers, the principals, are given, but they must have been traveling performers, since they are nowhere to be found on other Petrovsky Theater programs.
It hardly mattered, since ballet at the Petrovsky Theater was of much less importance to Maddox than opera and drama. It was also derivative, replicating Italian and French practices, and posing no threat to the bigger-budget ballets staged at court in St. Petersburg. The pantomimes Maddox produced had resonant names like The Fountain of Good and Bad Fortune, but gauging what exactly occurred onstage is hopeless. There exists the occasional newspaper bulletin about fantastic special effects and elaborate costume changes, as in the case of a ballet from 1781 titled Harlequin Sorcerer, whose trickster hero appeared in at least eight different outfits. Maddox also mounted the ballet Acis and Galatea at the Petrovsky. The ballet, to music by Franz Hilverding—a composer in and out of debtor’s prison—had been performed in the Winter Palace by noble amateurs with amazing (for the time) special effects.31 The hero, the poor shepherd Acis, falls into the hands of the reprehensible Cyclops Polyphemus, who hurls him through the air toward a mountain. He would have been killed by the blow had he not been saved by Love. Polyphemus goes for the kill again in the second act, this time hurling an entire cliff toward Acis and his beloved, the beautiful nymph Galatea. Love intervenes once more, gathering the shepherd and nymph into his arms and sweeping them through the clouds into his namesake kingdom. Neither the pulleys and ropes used to produce these marvels nor the reactions of the audience to them are mentioned in the sources. It was said, however, that when the ballet was presented at the Winter Palace, the apotheosis brought tears to Catherine the Great’s eyes.
Maddox first relied on Paradis as ballet teacher and creator before turning to expatriate Italian talent. In 1782, Maddox enlisted Francesco Morelli, a Milanese dancer who had performed for seven years in St. Petersburg before settling into a teaching position at Moscow University. Morelli’s sacrifice to his art left his once-acrobatic legs battered and fragile and his feet (in the opinion of one of his students) “scorched.”32 The official records of his career cannot be trusted, since he suffered amnesia in his dotage and filled them with errors. It seems that, near the end of his life, he taught dance to serfs, but evidence also finds him doing clerical work and engaged in regular disputes with his employer. He married the daughter of a count and lived in the count’s home, later boasting that he somehow prevented its destruction by Napoleon’s troops. Morelli remained with Maddox for about fourteen years. His tasks included teaching classes and leading rehearsals; ordering masks, costumes, and props; arranging auditions; moving dancers on and off of the stage; and cueing the orchestra. Morelli created ballets about star-crossed love, ancient and modern, on land and sea, but nothing that lasted beyond a single season. His brother Cosmo, a dancer of loose morals involved in several sex scandals, helped him with his work. Morelli’s final ballet for Maddox was The Two-Timed Village Doctor—an attractive potpourri organized