St Petersburg полностью

The soil for this flowering of opera and ballet was fertile because both theatrical institutions belonged to the emperor and were completely subsidized by the royal treasury. In Russia, the rulers traditionally did not skimp on support for the theater. When a reporter for the popular Severnaya pchela visited London in 1837, he had the opportunity to compare the staging of Rossini’s opera Semiramide in the capitals of Britain and Russia. Here is what he reported: “In London the staging of operas is miserly. The scenery is average, the choruses are thin. How can one compare Semiramide in Petersburg with the London production? Ours is lush, full, animated; here [in London] it is poor, thin, weak. We do everything that is possible; here they do not even do half of what is necessary.”10 Another author observed, “Our productions surpass those of the Parisians in magnificence and luxury.”11

In a typical Petersburg ballet of the period, the sets were changed half a dozen times, and during the same performance the audience might also see “various dances, games, marches, and battles,” plus such effects as “mechanical rising and eclipse of the sun, earthquakes, mountains spewing flames, and the destruction of the Temple of the Sun.”

Nicholas I enjoyed a laugh or two at a fashionable French vaudeville and could be deeply touched by stolid Russian patriotic dramas, but he truly relaxed only when watching the ballet. The emperor was not an ordinary balletomane but an ideological one. In the words of the poet Afanasy Fet, “Emperor Nicholas, convinced that beauty is a sign of strength, demanded and got from his astonishingly disciplined and trained troops total subordination and uniformity.” These same qualities impressed the emperor in ballet, and it was no accident that the Russian corps de ballet became a model of discipline and training.

A witness of the Petersburg production of the ballet La Révolte au serail in 1836 gives a glowing account of how the corps was trained. The legendary romantic ballerina Marie Taglioni danced the part of a strong-headed beauty who led the army of concubines to rise against the sultan. Nicholas I sent his guard officers to train the “army” of dancers in military techniques.

At first this amused the girls, but then they got bored and grew lazy. Hearing of that, the tsar came to a rehearsal and sternly admonished the theater’s amazons: “If they did not practice seriously, he would have them stand outside in the freezing cold for two hours with rifles, wearing their dancing shoes.” You should have seen the zeal with which the frightened recruits in skirts went about their work.12

After the triumphant premiere of La Révolte au serail, Nicholas never missed a single performance, enjoying the sight of the ballet regiment, armed, in the words of a playful Petersburg reviewer, “with the white weapons of full shoulders and rounded little arms.”13

The unprecedented uniformity and precision of movement made the performances of the Russian corps de ballet the artistic equivalent of the military parades and maneuvers so typical of Petersburg. Classical ballet and imperial army discipline found a common aesthetic ground. As Yuri Lotman put it, “The question: how will this end? becomes secondary in both ballet and parades” because “precision and beauty of movement are of more interest to the connoisseur than the plot.”14 It is tempting to speculate that this imperial-militaristic inattention to plot in dance was one of the many impulses for the subsequent development of Russian plotless ballet, with Marius Petipa as its founder, Michel Fokine’s Chopiniana its first masterpiece, and George Balanchine its acknowledged master.

George Balanchine was born on January 9, 1904, the son of the Georgian composer Meliton Balanchivadze, who is still sometimes called “the Georgian Glinka.” His Russian mother, Maria, was the daughter of a German, and thus, Balanchine had Georgian, Russian, and German blood. Born in Petersburg, he visited Georgia for the first time when he was fifty-eight.

The first Georgians appeared in Petersburg soon after the city was founded. Their number grew rapidly after 1801, when Alexander I annexed independent Georgia, a flourishing state in the Caucasus with an ancient Christian culture; this was done, as the imperial manifesto put it, “Not in order to add to our powers and expand our borders, but to end the sorrows of the Georgian people.”15

At first the Georgian nobility lived in Petersburg, most of them forcibly moved there so they would not interfere with their country’s absorption into the Russian empire. But when Georgia’s loss of independence became a certainty, many young Georgians—like the youth of other nations that made up the Russian empire—started migrating to Petersburg by choice to obtain a European education.