The Museum of Ballet

There’s still a half-hour before curtains-up, but all approaches to the mariinsky theater are blocked by traffic. And there’s no other way to get there from our city-center hotel other than by car: it’s a 15-minute walk to the metro, and, while trams do run right past the theater, they do so only irregularly.

“What’s playing?” Asks the taxi driver. The photographer and i start to explain that today is an historic occasion, because the

legendary choreographer and one-time Mariinsky dancer Yury Grigorovich, formerly head of the theater’s ballet company, had brought his new theater, which he founded in 1996 in Krasnodar, after leaving Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, to St. Petersburg for the first time. Over the last few years, Grigorovich’s new theater has taken on almost all of his major works, and today is performing his celebrated Spartacus. The driver listens carefully, nods politely, and then asks: “How many acts?” Three, we tell him; he thinks for a moment, then says: “That means it’ll finish about 11 o’clock. Good. There won’t be any traffic jams then, so I can do several runs to hotels.”

The Mariinsky Theater is one of St. Petersburg’s most famous symbols, alongside the Bronze Horseman, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and the raised bridges over the Neva during June’s White Nights. Founded in the 1780s, it is one of the world’s oldest theaters, mentioned in the same breath as La Scala, Covent Garden, the Grand Opera, Comedie Francaise, Moscow’s Bolshoi and Maly and another St. Petersburg theater, the Alexandriinsky, all of which helped shape their countries’ national theatrical traditions.

In this, the Mariinsky has played a particularly high-profile role: it is the cradle of classical Russian opera and ballet, which even today make up a large chunk of the world’s most popular repertoire. It was for the Mariinsky that Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky wrote their operas; it was here that Marius Petipa staged Sleeping Beauty, and his protégé Lev Ivanov premiered Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. It was here that Fyodor Shalyapin made his name, and here that Mikhail Fokin began the quest that would end with the triumph of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris.

All this history resonates on approaching the Mariinsky’s emerald building on Theater Square. The square was a center of entertainment in the city as early as the middle of the 18th century: here, masked balls and equestrian contests were held, carousels whirled, and markets and fairs traded. On the site of the current Mariinsky was a wooden circus, which in the middle of the 19th century was given the status of “Imperial” and rebuilt by Albert Cavos as a stone building that often staged fairy-tales in musical and dance form. After the fire of 1859, Cavos rebuilt the circus in just one year, but as an opera theater named Mariinsky, in honor of Empress Maria, wife of Emperor Alexander II.

The Mariinsky enjoyed its golden age in this building. Walking through its showcase front-of-house halls – joyous, but with no theatrics; decorated in quiet shades of pearly gray, white, and light blue; adorned with majestic crystal chandeliers – you could easily think you are not in a theater foyer, but the living quarters of the Winter Palace. This is actually not that far from the truth, as the Mariinsky Theater was a public salon for the Court in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Protocol dictated visits by heads of state and personal guests of the tsar’s family, and even everyday performances had the impression of a court ritual.

The management of the imperial theaters molded their cast of performers, directors, artists, and composers with as much care as the jewelers who selected diamonds for imperial finery (though influential prima donnas such as the ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya would refuse to play by the rules and simply dispose of any functionaries who got in their way). The singers and ballerinas were frequently compared in high-society talk and newspaper columns – but then how else could sublime mastery of Italian bel canto or bewitching virtuoso ballet technique be described if not in these terms?

This era introduced a number of inventions into everyday theatrical use, including the famous 32 fouettés first used by Pierina Legnani in Cinderella, the celeste – a small keyboard instrument which mimics the sound of bells – which Tchaikovsky made part of his Nutcracker orchestra, new electric stage machinery, and so on. But the Mariinsky’s most important achievement was the Russian national opera repertoire created by Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky and the “Mighty Handful,” and the revelations of Marius Petipa that nourish ballet to this day: in La Bayadere, Sleeping Beauty, and Raimonda, Petipa subjugated dance to the principles of symphonic music, developing choreographic combinations as composers use themes and leitmotifs.

At the turn of the century, artists of the World of Art movement tried to break into theatrical art, but the Revolution forced them to continue their quest in Europe. However, the Mariinsky was able not only to cling onto its traditions in the Soviet era, but also to create powerful new currents in musical theater, such as “choreographic drama,” or ballet renditions of drama; diametrically opposed abstract forms, combining traditional ballet and the avant-garde; the ballet of Yury Grigorovich, which merged both ideas; as well as expressionist experiments by opera directors.

“It USED TO BE RED”

At the  administrative entrance where  honored guests and the press enter the Mariinsky Theater, everything is confusion. The photographer and I elbow our way through in search of the press secretary. Ahead, all is laughter, cries of greeting, and swinging television-camera lights. When we reach the lit-up space, we see why: Yury Grigorovich, suntanned and smiling, in an elegant dark-blue suit, is greeting every guest personally. Next to him is his wife, former Bolshoi prima ballerina Natalia Bessmertnova. “Yura, you see – I came specially from my dacha just to look at you,” flirts the famous 1960s prima ballerina Ninel Kurgapkina, Rudolf Nureyev’s helper for his Paris La Bayadere and now working with the Mariinsky’s most famous current ballerina, Ulyana Lopatkina.

To the public, performances by Grigorovich’s theater are grand and showy; to the man himself, they are highly labor-intensive. Four runs of daily performances, with three works in each: Spartacus, The Nutcracker, The Golden Age, and Romeo and Juliette. The hall is packed at prices that, for St. Petersburg, are sky-high, starting at 1,500 rubles (about $50); there are VIPs from St. Petersburg and Krasnodar – as well as Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and his U.S. counterpart, Donald Rumsfeld, who gave Spartacus a standing ovation. The dancers and their teachers applaud excitedly, swapping opinions, and then there is endless back-slapping backstage.

Then comes night-time scene-changing and lighting rehearsals, followed by a run-through with the cast the next morning, as there’s no other time. We invite ourselves to one of the rehearsals – otherwise we won’t be able to get an interview with Grigorovich, whom everyone is after.

“Please don’t take any pictures,” Grigorovich frowns. “Half of the artists are in rehearsal costume, and will only be marking their steps.” But he relents when he finds out we are not from television.

“Let’s get down what I have to tell you quickly, because later you’ll have to wait for an hour and a half while we run through the big scenes. I danced at the Mariinsky for seventeen years, and began directing here. Then I headed this theater’s ballet company, and exactly forty years ago I moved to Moscow to head the Bolshoi Ballet. The productions we took on tour I created in Moscow and my versions were never part of the Petersburg repertoire. Of course, I get very nervous and am acutely aware of my responsibility. I hope that our performers will give the audience a new insight into these works, and that the experienced Petersburg public brings out artistic revelations from the dancers.”

I turn off my recorder. But the stage is not yet ready for the rehearsal, and Grigorivich, unfettered by “protocol,” carries on. The famous brocade curtain slowly descends. “You know it used to be red?” Grigorovich says. “Yes, that was how Alexander Golovin designed and made it. But the color scheme was so strong that my teacher, Simon Virsaladze – a master of staging whom I worked with for many years, made a blue version to match the fittings of the hall. Golovin’s red curtain is still used as a decoration during concerts.”

We ask whether Grigorovich will have to make any changes, given that the Mariinsky stage is six meters narrower than the Bolshoi’s, and that the auditorium is more compact and has two more balconies.

“No, no”, he smiles. “But because of this, the performances will make a special impression here. Every member of the audience will feel as though they are part of a festival, but also as though the performance is being staged just for them.”

When the rehearsal starts, everything becomes clear: If Moscow’s Bolshoi is a theater for large-scale ballets with casts of hundreds, then the Mariinsky is for soloists, and its stage seems to put them into extreme close-up.

From 1964, when Grigorovich left the Mariinsky Theater to head the Bolshoi Ballet, to the beginning of the 1990s, the St. Petersburg company was essentially a choreography museum, preserving and demonstrating the best ballet of 19th- and 20th-century ballet stagings, as well as impeccable dance technique. This era in the theater’s history is symbolized by the program “An Evening of Old Choreography”, comprising surviving fragments of 19th-century ballets with sets and costumes stylized from old paintings by the artist Igor Ivanov. (A shortened version can be seen in the widely available video recording A Night of Classical Ballet.)

The prima donna of St. Petersburg ballet in those years was Irina Kolpakova, the last pupil of Agrippina Vaganova, founding mother of the Russian academic school. Kolpakova executed even the most difficult combinations of steps with brilliant ease, rather like a bel canto soprano with virtuoso coloratura passages. Kolpakova’s fellow soloists included ballerinas of various styles, each of whom could easily have been the leading lady of another company: the temperamental virtuosi Gabriella Komleva and Alla Sizova, both electric actors of incredible stamina; the poetic Elena Yevteyeva, whose dancing revived the image of the featherweight ballerinas of the Romantic era; the radiant Svetlana Yefremova, who brought a ray of sunshine to the stage; the lyrical Lyubov Kunakova, whose fluid dancing exuded the placidity, strength and good-nature traditionally associated with the Russian character; and the unique Galina Mezentseva, the most brilliant personality of the 1970s and 1980s, whose dancing lines and interpretation fused strict Petersburg academism with 20th-century schools from avant-garde to expressionism and existentialism.

Today, one can hear snatches of foreign conversation in the Mariinsky’s labyrinthine backstage corridors, or run into renowned dancers or choreographers from Europe and America on their way to a rehearsal or discussing some project or other – the aging walls with their peeling paintwork and the shabby old furniture are the only reminder that this is Russia’s oldest theater.

The Mariinsky has always been a significant international player. Some of Europe’s top artists worked here, such as Verdi, who wrote one of his finest operas, La Forza del Destino, as a commission from the theater. Wagner’s operas received their Russian premieres here. In turn, Mariinsky alumni such as Shalyapin, the choreographer Georgy Balanchivadze – better known by the name he adopted in America: George Balanchine – and many others blazed trails in opera and ballet around the world in the 20th century.

In asserting itself as a major center for contemporary musical theater, the Mariinsky has recently been preparing for a massive overhaul of its historical home and for the construction of a new building. The upheavals associated with this preparation and the often heated discussions surrounding it have proved to be no less entertaining than the dramas which unfold on its stage.

A Window on Europe

The appointment of Valery Gergiev as artistic director marked the beginning of a new era for the Mariinsky Theater. Gergiev’s main interest is in opera, which assumed primary importance with his arrival. But Gergiev radically changed every aspect of the life of the theater, as a result of which Petersburg ballet has undergone equally striking changes.

Crowded into the beautiful if cramped (for 150 journalists, at least) foyer before the premiere of The Nutcracker – staged not by a choreographer, but the artist Mikhail Shemyakin – we looked forward to a rare discussion with Gergiev about ballet rather than opera. Gergiev was delayed: some said he had arrived at the theater in the morning, others that he had just got there. While we waited, we swapped thoughts on Gergiev’s career and the influence it has had on the Mariinsky Theater.

Gergiev’s rise began at the Leningrad Conservatory, in the class of Ilya Musin, the guru of the Russian conducting school. At the age of 23, Gergiev won the Soviet Union’s National Conducting Competition and the Herbert von Karajan Competition in West Berlin, where he was supported by jury member Tikhon Khrennikov, then the influential head of the Union of Composers of the USSR. Khrennikov also arranged for Gergiev to conduct the premiere of his ballet, The Hussar’s Ballad, in St. Petersburg. It was with this work that Gergiev made his debut at Moscow’s Bolshoi.

“Do you know how funny his debut was?” recalled one journalist who saw the performance. “He was so nervous that he frightened the orchestra so much that the musicians had to stop at one point. Thankfully, the show was just a normal performance, and no-one noticed.”

After the 1988 death of Yevgeny Mravinsky, legendary principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic, his post went to Yury Temirkanov, then artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater (which, from 1935 to 1992 was actually known as the Kirov Theater). Temirkanov’s position at the Mariinsky was taken by Gergiev, who immediately made plain his intention to strengthen the theater’s standing worldwide, and stunned the Russian public with his workaholism, unbelievable by the standards of the time. Putting on half a dozen new opera productions a season became the norm for the Mariinsky, which began to restage all of Prokofiev’s main operas. Gergiev gave the Russian premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal, and over the course of several years put on the whole of the Ring cycle. He also became friends with Placido Domingo, who performed in Mariinsky productions and gala concerts, and introduced about a dozen singers onto the European stage, who became principals at top theaters worldwide. The theater became home to opera festivals dedicated to Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Prokofiev, as well as the annual Stars of the White Nights in the summer. There were also regular tours abroad – to the joy of poor Russian artists and pragmatic European managers (because frequently it works out cheaper to bring a ready-made production from Russia than to put together a new staging in Europe).

But Gergiev does not confine himself solely to running the Mariinsky Theater. Somehow, he manages to combine this work with duties as principal guest conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, director of festivals in Rotterdam and Mikkeli, and annual appearances at the Salzburg Festival – the most prestigious in Europe – as well as numerous individual projects. New additions to this list are made regularly, the most recent including the Moscow Easter Festival and the extended musical celebration of St. Petersburg’s 300th anniversary. Unsurprisingly, discussions of the quantity of Gergiev’s work and its effect on the quality of his conducting are a continual topic amongst arts aficionados.

Reviews of Gergiev’s performances and concerts include both those which credit him with an unbelievable temperament and interpretational genius, and thorough critical dissections of his work. From this we can surmise that some of the conductor’s performances make a very strong impression on the public. But working in a hurry is one of his trademarks: for the most part, the program of the Moscow Easter Festival sounded fussy and one-paced, in which individual works were ignored and secondary details were given overdue prominence. On occasion, Gergiev operas have a patchwork feel: in important vocal scenes he muffles the orchestra, while giving himself free rein in instrumental episodes. Even at the Salzburg Festival, with one of the world’s top orchestras and first-class singers at his disposal, it seemed that the ensemble’s musicianship was a real burden: Gergiev wanted to lead and to shine, but the perfidious operatic genre continually demanded that he give the limelight to his cast. Possibly for this reason the conductor takes more pleasure in the symphonic repertoire, which he can interpret as he wants. And in opera Gergiev is at his best dealing with Wagnerian epics, in which the voices, like orchestral instruments, are intertwined into the musical fabric.

Gergiev’s fans excuse his defects by pointing to his exorbitant workload and organizational difficulties. And indeed, Gergiev thinks about these even during his most important performances, discussing them right before going on stage and on the way out of the orchestra pit. For him it is the most natural thing in the world to have several plans on the go at once, to talk with different people simultaneously, to be in a rush, to mobilize people, or to change his plans on short notice. Negotiations are for him as much of an art form as music, and he can discuss economic and political aspects of culture as animatedly as the theater.

Our press conference is a vivid example. Gergiev’s tardiness – by a half-hour – is of course forgiven. What does it matter when we hear him? We have to spend all day in the theater in any case. Immediately after the conference, there is a rehearsal on stage, and then the performance. Gergiev is forgiven for barely listening to questions in an attempt to save time: his first answer is a long rambling monologue covering everything that could be asked and everything he considers necessary.

The problem is not that Gergiev combines being an artist and a businessman, but that he often substitutes one for the other. For example, he invested huge effort into bringing a veritable galaxy of stars and famous ensembles together for St. Petersburg’s 300th anniversary, rather than finding real artistic ideas for the occasion. He staged a remake of Diaghilev’s Saisons Russes at Paris’ Le Chatelet theater rather than coming up with his own equivalent. He attempts to make artistic projects into social and political events, and vice versa.

Because of this, Gergiev often falls into the trap of missing the obvious. The comic Nutcracker, with its stage so overflowing with Shemyakin’s window-dressing that there was virtually no room left for the dance, is in itself not a problem: the production made its mark. But Gergiev failed to notice that the premiere coincided with the 120th anniversary of the birth of the legendary Anna Pavlova, the ultimate symbol of St. Petersburg ballet. And he did not use this as a reason for an artistically “exclusive” project.

Similar omissions can be seen in Gergiev’s strategy for the development of the Mariinsky Theater, which he has turned from Russia’s leading theater, with its own aesthetic traditions, into a peripheral European theater. On Gergiev’s watch, directing and staging have fused Russian opera with the language of foreign theater. But with a couple of exceptions, no productions in this sphere have been artistic revelations or examples of cutting-edge trends. Musically, St. Petersburg has still not consolidated its position in world opera: appearances by leading foreign (even Russian) singers are still rare events, rather than everyday occurrences. Unlike Europe’s top theaters, for all its global ambitions, the Mariinsky cannot guarantee that the listed performers will necessarily be playing – or even that the performance will be the one advertised. It has become the custom in Russia for everything to change not half a year in advance, but a month or even a week before the event, which makes it very difficult for respectable people who plan far ahead to rely seriously on the theater.

But Gergiev’s most paradoxical achievement is that his various musical activities have made him into a newsmaker whose image bears little or no relation to the artistic logic of what he does. It is of great interest to the Russian public that the conductor did not tell former Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi why he advocated American architect Eric Owen Moss’ avant-garde project for renovating the Mariinsky building before suddenly rejecting it, and whether his wife accompanies him on his numerous long trips abroad, and how many children he has. Gergiev’s life has become a more significant performance than any of the operas he conducts.

HOLLOW VICTORIES

The ballet company has been just as actively involved in the process of Europeanization. Its work at home, which produced fascinating original repertoire, has been virtually abandoned in favor of intensive, wearisome foreign tours and the transfer to the Mariinsky’s stage of foreign, 20th-century classics of choreography. In these years, the company has hurriedly come to grips with all the main works of George Balanchine, the ballets of Jerome Robbins, and older works by living classics such as Roland Petit, William Forsythe, and John Neumaier.

“Of course, it’s very interesting to work with the world’s best choreographers, producing especially for you,” said Andrian Fadeev, one of the company’s best young dancers, and the only artist who has managed to work with all of the famous directors whom the Mariinsky has invited in recent years. “But, at the same time, such a large theater needs an artistic leader who defines the main direction of its development. Also, it’s important for young artists to look up to the masters of the older generation who provide a model of performance style.”

Today, Petersburg ballet’s best-known masters, its standard bearers – the ballerinas Irina Kolpakova and Alla Sizova, the choreographer Oleg Vinogradov, and dozens of renowned young artists such as Yelena Pankova, Larisa Lezhina, and Anastasia Dunets – live and work in Europe and America. In their place, the Mariinsky Theater has founded an annual ballet festival which showcases top dancers from Europe and America.

At the same time, the Mariinsky has launched some ambitious plans, trying to polish its crown jewels by reconstructing Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadere, those 19th-century choreography encyclopedias created for its stage by Marius Petipa. Ex-Mariinsky dancer Sergei Vikharev and artist Andrei Voitenko have tried to recreate the original design, staging, steps, and gestures from recordings by former Mariinsky director Nikolai Sergeev. After the Revolution, Sergeev took his recordings to London, and they subsequently ended up in the Harvard Theater Collection, which generously gave the Mariinsky all the materials it needed.

The result was a performance of a fundamentally different type of ballet. In 20th-century editions of Sleeping Beauty and La Bayadere, the most important thing is classical dance. Russian choreographers tried to underscore that Petipa used physical motifs like composers use musical themes. Therefore the pantomime “conversations,” showpiece entrances of extras and demonstration of sham miracles in Soviet editions only emphasized the dance scenes.

In the reconstructed productions, everything is turned on its head. These are ballet processions, in which classical dance comes out of ceremonial rituals. The characters in their heavy costumes do not stand out against the monumental, detail-heavy scenery, but are rather swallowed up by it and look like component parts. All of the extras are dressed just as gaudily as the soloists. This style looks like carnival kitsch from a circus presentation or pictures in a fashionable 19th-century magazine. Petipa – angling for success with the Petersburg public – largely copied these kitsch shows in works based on Spanish, Hungarian, and Egyptian fairy tales, set to the fiery can-cans of Cesare Puni.

These reconstructions ought to have been a sensation – the ballet equivalent of the discovery of Troy or the raising of the Titanic – but instead were met with suspicion. Russian dancers and balletomanes wondered whether a precise reconstruction was possible when the recording system captured only the outermost points of the movements, without showing how they were executed. Critics suggested that such reconstructions ignore points of reference and, eventually, destroy the basis of the ballet school: the dance combinations which have come down to us, passed from artist to artist – from leg to leg, as it were – authentic and tested by time for artistic “durability.” And what was brought out of the archives was dubious.

But another problem was more obvious. The current artists were unable to create the impression of an old-fashioned dance style fundamentally different from the style they are used to. Petipa’s ballets demand worldly chic and lively, artistic movement. When Matilda Kshesinskaya, Nicholas II’s favorite and the grande dame of the Mariinsky Theater, performed the episodic role of Little Red Riding Hood in Sleeping Beauty, dressed in a short skirt and apron, and Petipa’s strapping daughter Maria came on as Cinderella, this created a comic effect in itself. Petipa’s physical efforts and stylistics remained behind the scenes, in the rehearsal rooms and exercises that the public never saw, while the action on stage appeared effortless.

The previous generation of Petersburg ballet dancers – artists such as Irina Kolpakova, Gabriella Komleva, and Galina Mezentseva – were able to stylize old-fashioned performance practice even in Soviet editions of Petipa’s ballets. For today’s artists to perform a version which is much closer to the original 19th-century production is almost impossible. They are used to dazzling audiences with their unique physical gifts and head-spinning technical tricks, but have more difficulty enchanting them with artistry and a sense of style. They put in huge amounts of energy, dance fussily and heavily, commit lots of errors, and look nothing at all like the characters in the performance.

But even when the company is on form and dancing error-free, it does not follow the laws of theater psychology. The dancers are more like colors or musical timbres in the on-stage action than they are characters, and, as a result, the airy, impressionist Chopiniana and the graphic “Dance of the Shades” from La Bayadere are indistinguishable from each other. The amusing game interludes from Don Quixote appear unnatural. The artists have no way to understand brilliant stylistic scenes (such as La Bayadere’s monumental pantomime dialogs, which Petipa staged in European classical style), and therefore execute them formally, like schoolchildren at an exam. The current successes of the Mariinsky are predicated not on demonstrations of a unique Russian dance style, but merely on having a number of good dancers and on the scale of the theater’s productions.  RL