Bolshoi confidential : secrets of the Russian ballet from the rule of the tsars to today

First Title Value for Searching:

Personal Author:

Morrison, Simon Alexander, 1964-

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

xxix, 507 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, photographs ; 25 cm.

Summary:

"On a freezing night in January 2013, a hooded assailant hurled acid in the face of the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. The crime, organized by a lead soloist, dragged one of Russia's most illustrious institutions into scandal. The Bolshoi Theater had been a crown jewel during the reign of the tsars and an emblem of Soviet power throughout the twentieth century. The attack and its torrid aftermath underscored the importance of the Bolshoi to the art of ballet, to Russia, and to the world. The acid attack resonated far beyond the world of ballet, both into Russia's political infrastructure and, as renowned musicologist Simon Morrison shows in his tour-de-force account, the very core of the Bolshoi’s unparalleled history. With exclusive access to state archives and private sources, Morrison sweeps us through the history of the storied ballet, describing the careers of those onstage as well as off, tracing the political ties that bind the institution to the varying Russian regimes, and detailing the birth of some of the best-loved ballets in the repertoire. As Morrison reveals in lush and insightful prose, the theater has been bombed, rigged with explosives, and reinforced with cement. Its dancers have suffered unimaginable physical torment to climb the ranks, sometimes for so little money that they kept cows at home whose milk they could sell for food. But the Bolshoi has transcended its own fraught history, surviving 250 years of artistic and political upheaval to define not only Russian culture but also ballet itself. In this sweeping, definitive account, Morrison demonstrates once and for all that, as Russia goes, so goes the Bolshoi Ballet"--

Contents:

The swindling magician -- Napoleon and after -- Fleet as lightning: the career of Ekaterina Sankovskaya -- Imperialism -- After the Bolsheviks -- Censorship -- I, Maya Plisetskaya -- Epilogue.

Subject Term:

Ballet -- Russia -- History.

Ballet -- Soviet Union -- History.

Ballet companies -- Russia -- History.

Ballet companies -- Soviet Union -- History.

Ballet -- Political aspects -- Russia -- History.

Ballet -- Political aspects -- Soviet Union -- History.

Publication Info:

New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, [2016]

Subject:

Ballet -- Russia -- History.

Ballet -- Soviet Union -- History.

Ballet companies -- Russia -- History.

Ballet companies -- Soviet Union -- History.

Ballet -- Political aspects -- Russia -- History.

Ballet -- Political aspects -- Soviet Union -- History.

Bolʹshoĭ teatr Rossii. Balet -- History.

Большой театр России. Балет

SAILS ISBN:

9780871402967

Available:

Library	Shelf Number	Shelf Location	Status
Searching... Fairhaven-Millicent	792.8 MOR 2016	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Mansfield Public Library	792.8 M	NONFICTION	Searching... Unknown

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

On a freezing night in January 2013, a hooded assailant hurled acid in the face of the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. The crime, organized by a lead soloist, dragged one of Russia's most illustrious institutions into scandal. The Bolshoi Theater had been a crown jewel during the reign of the tsars and an emblem of Soviet power throughout the twentieth century. Under Putin in the twenty-first century, it has been called on to preserve a priceless artistic legacy and mirror Russia's neo-imperial ambitions. The attack and its torrid aftermath underscored the importance of the Bolshoi to the art of ballet, to Russia, and to the world.

The acid attack resonated far beyond the world of ballet, both into Russia's political infrastructure and, as renowned musicologist Simon Morrison shows in his tour-de-force account, the very core of the Bolshoi's unparalleled history. With exclusive access to state archives and private sources, Morrison sweeps us through the history of the storied ballet, describing the careers of those onstage as well as off, tracing the political ties that bind the institution to the varying Russian regimes, and detailing the birth of some of the best-loved ballets in the repertoire.

From its disreputable beginnings in 1776 at the hand of a Faustian charlatan, the Bolshoi became a point of pride for the tsarist empire after the defeat of Napoleon in 1812. After the revolution, Moscow was transformed from a merchant town to a global capital, its theater becoming a key site of power. Meetings of the Communist Party were hosted at the Bolshoi, and the Soviet Union was signed into existence on its stage. During the Soviet years, artists struggled with corrosive censorship, while ballet joined chess tournaments and space exploration as points of national pride and Cold War contest. Recently, a $680 million restoration has restored the Bolshoi to its former glory, even as prized talent has departed.

As Morrison reveals in lush and insightful prose, the theater has been bombed, rigged with explosives, and reinforced with cement. Its dancers have suffered unimaginable physical torment to climb the ranks, sometimes for so little money that they kept cows at home whose milk they could sell for food. But the Bolshoi has transcended its own fraught history, surviving 250 years of artistic and political upheaval to define not only Russian culture but also ballet itself. In this sweeping, definitive account, Morrison demonstrates once and for all that, as Russia goes, so goes the Bolshoi Ballet.

Reviews (3)

Guardian Review

The story of Russia's flagship dance company, from the patronage of the tsars to surveillance by the KGB, mirrors the country's tempestuous recent history This massive survey of the 240-year history of Russia's most famous theatre begins on the night of 17 January 2013 when Sergei Filin, artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, had acid thrown in his face. The crime, instigated by a member of the company whose ballerina girlfriend had been denied promotion, left Filin half-blind and the Bolshoi's reputation in tatters. How could an institution that existed to celebrate beauty and exalted emotion be riven by such anger, jealousy and violence? Quite easily, suggests Simon Morrison, Princeton professor of music. "Rather than an awful aberration, the attack had precedents of sorts in the Bolshoi's rich and complicated past," he writes. "That past is one of remarkable achievements interrupted, and even fuelled, by periodic bouts of madness." Indeed, the assault on Filin pales alongside the treatment meted out to a forgotten teenage ballerina, Avdotya Arshinina, who on 5 January 1847 was "dumped at the door of a hospital experiencing 'fits of madness' and 'constant delirium'. Pale and emaciated, she had severe injuries on her head and body as well as bruised, infected, 'blackened' genitalia." She died of her injuries 13 days later. The subsequent investigation revealed that, with the collusion of her father, she had been drugged and gang-raped at a party thrown by Prince Boris Cherkassky. The aristocrat, inevitably, escaped punishment; her father was sent to Siberia for two years. The case revealed, Morrison notes, "a wretched economy where lesser-skilled dancers were promised access, through their art, to aristocratic circles, only to become sex slaves". This history is peppered with shocking incidents of sex, violence and cruelty. Morrison chronicles the dead cat thrown at the feet of Elena Andreyanova by a supporter of her rival, Ekaterina Sankovskaya, in 1847 and the appalling double suicide in 1928 of two dancers who plunged to their deaths "from the uppermost flies of the stage in full view of the public" for love of the designer Mikhail Kurilko. The ballerina Ekaterina Geltser -- saviour of Russian ballet, according to no less an authority than Konstantin Stanislavski -- was at the time performing The Red Poppy, an early and popular example of Soviet propaganda where brave workers side with the oppressed Chinese against the fiendish British. Morrison's contention is that such incidents of individual drama are part of a theatrical culture intimately entwined with the nation's politics and mores. "In Russia, politics can be theatre, and theatre politics," he argues. The connection was there from the very beginning, when in 1780 the Englishman Michael Maddox --"either a mathematician or a tightrope walker during his youth" -- ended up with a licence from Catherine the Great to run a theatre (the first of three that have stood on more or less the same site in Moscow). His money troubles meant that the place quickly became reliant on imperial support, and the proprietorial interest this triggered among Russia's rulers continued through the tsars, into the Soviet era and up to the present day. The February revolution in 1917 caused surprisingly little disruption -- the rehearsal schedule simply announced "no rehearsal on account of revolution" and a performance was suspended. But after October, when the Bolsheviks seized full control, the ideological problems of ballet itself were a cause for much soul-searching. The Bolshoi may have been the scene for the declaration of the Soviet Union -- in December 1922, it hosted the political congress that voted the USSR into being -- but the ballet performances on its stages represented a real challenge to revolutionary values. In the crisis of 1918-19, the hardline Moscow commissar Vladimir Galkin asked: "Are we still of the mind to keep allowing precious fuel to be thrown into the voracious furnaces of the Moscow state theatres, tickling the nerves of diamond-clad baronesses, while depriving heating stoves of the wood that could save hundreds of labourers from illness and death?" Maya Plisetskaya had to write grovelling letters to Khrushchev apologising for not respecting the KGB surveillance It was Lenin himself who answered him. "It seems that comrade Galkin has a somewhat naive conception of the theatre's role and significance. We need it less for propaganda than to give rest to our workers at the end of the day. And it's too early yet to put the bourgeois artistic heritage in an archive." So the Bolshoi survived, becoming under Stalin a key tool in the propaganda war, where ballet had to represent heroic workers, not fairytale princes, and each commission was subject to censorship from Glavrepertkom, a board that controlled every aspect of every performance, with stultifying and dangerous consequences. Morrison charts the effects on composers such as Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Khachaturian in minute detail. In a lengthy chapter on the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, whose father was shot and mother imprisoned during one of Stalin's purges, he recounts how even in the years of the "thaw" she had to write grovelling letters to Khrushchev apologising for not respecting the KGB surveillance to which she was subject, in order to be allowed to travel abroad. "In the last few years I have behaved unspeakably badly without realising the responsibility that rests on me as an actress with the Bolshoi theatre," she wrote, listing the crime of talking to foreigners without permission among her many sins. Ironically, given her pursuit of artistic and intellectual freedom, it was Plisetskaya's performance of Swan Lake that was played on an endless loop on Soviet TV during the ill-fated coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 -- a symbol, if one were needed, of the ties between the Bolshoi Ballet and the state that Morrison devotes some 500 pages to describing. Yet for all its forensic detail and fascinating facts, this is a flawed undertaking. It has a confusing tendency to double back on itself in terms of chronology, as if the detail has overwhelmed the writer. He loses his thread in the labyrinths he is exploring. Characters appear so briefly you lose track of who's who. More crucially, Morrison is a music specialist, a fact that is reflected in lengthy, revealing but not always pertinent discursions on composers who provided scores for the ballet. What he isn't -- judging by this book -- is a ballet-lover: Bolshoi Confidential lacks any sense of the company's artistic merit. "More is known about the scandals than the glories of the Moscow stage," Morrison admits, "because the scandals generated heaps of documents. The glories ... inspired nothing more specific than poetic tributes, bouquets of words." But this approach skews the narrative. Morrison writes confidently about the Bolshoi's muscular, dramatic style, but he displays little understanding of the contribution made by individual dancers to the company's history. He can describe backstage intrigue, and the way audiences of the 1960s used to charge upstairs at the interval before the food in the top-floor canteen ran out, but not the way that Irek Mukhamedov made Yuri Grigorovich 's unwieldy The Golden Age flare to sudden life, or the impact Galina Ulanova had on audiences when she came to Moscow from St Petersburg, or why Plisetskaya was adored not just by the Politburo but by an entire generation of dance lovers. It is what unfolds on stage that makes the Bolshoi matter. This is a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes, but it pays too little attention to what happens when the curtain rises. - Sarah Crompton.

Kirkus Review

A sweeping, grandly intriguing story at the interface of art and power.The Bolshoi Theater Ballet, writes Morrison (Music/Princeton Univ.; Lina and Serge: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev, 2013), is the most Russian of the nations cultural institutions and the ballet the most Russian of its arts. A corps de ballet as old as the United States, the Bolshoi has not always been so exalted, particularly in its opening years. Early on, a curious Englishman named Michael Maddox, who had talked his way into the royal household as a tutor and then improvised an existence for himself as an impresario, catering to a public in search of amusement, took what would eventually become the state-endorsed theater on the beginning of a bumpy ride. As Morrison chronicles with wry delight, Maddox was not the first outsider to have sway over the Bolshoi. Though one ingnue complained that the Russian Revolution was terrible because it interrupted the work of the ballet school three whole weeks, it also brought a humorless Soviet functionary named Elena Malinovskaya, stern, stout, and flush-faced from nicotine, to the helm, and the Bolshoi would begin to produce earnestly didactic works such as Spartacus. Even though Aram Khachaturian distanced himself from his own composition, the Bolshoi has since revived it and other Soviet-era works, even if critics sniff that the productions are for tourists as souvenirs of Russian-Soviet exoticism. Morrison frames his story, always readable and brimming with curious anecdotes, with the recent, newsworthy acid attack on artistic director Sergei Filin, a strange episode that exposed not just clashes of individual personalities, but also competing views of what the Bolshoi should be, some of which may have emanated from inside the walls of the neighboring Kremlin. A must for ballet buffs. Not the last word on the Bolshoi, but a look backstage that is both lively and learned. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* About midway through Morrison's charming and astonishingly detailed history of Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet, he states that the art mattered, in a way that, arguably, ballet has never mattered anywhere else. Given the robust thoroughness of this book, Morrison may find no one who will argue this point. From its earliest days, through Napoléon's invasion, the reigns of czars and czarinas, Moscow burning more than once, and the Cold War, the Bolshoi Theater, founded in 1776, has survived and flourished. The Bolshoi's dancers, ballets, and composers, its administrators and detractors and supporters all are tantalizingly depicted here, including the evolution of Swan Lake, the Chinese denunciation of pigtails in The Red Poppy, and the twenty-first-century, $680-million-plus renovation of the Bolshoi Theater. Balletomanes will drool and sigh, music lovers will be fascinated (sadly, not everyone got a fair shake: Brilliant Soviet composers would be censored, their careers threatened along with their lives), and lovers of Russian history will gain fresh insights. Morrison notes that, despite the supposed deaths of classical music, opera, and ballet, all endure. A riveting history of a besieged, globally significant ballet company.--Kinney, Eloise Copyright 2016 Booklist