Natasha's Dance (9 page)

    For years the grief-stricken count would leave the Fountain House and walk incognito through the streets of Petersburg distributing money to the poor.
⁷⁷
He died in 1809, the richest nobleman in the whole of Russia, and no doubt the loneliest as well. In his testimony to his son he came close to rejecting root and branch the civilization embodied in his own life’s work. ‘My taste and passion for rare things,’ he wrote,

    was a form of vanity, like my desire to charm and surprise people’s feelings with things they had never seen or heard… I came to realize that the brilliance of such work could only satisfy for a short time and vanished instantly in the eyes of my contemporaries. It did not leave the remotest impression on the soul. What is all this splendour for?
⁷⁸

    On Praskovya’s death the count wrote to the new Emperor, Alexander I, to inform him of his marriage and appealed to him (successfully) to recognize the rights of Dmitry as his sole legitimate heir.
⁷⁹
He claimed that his wife had only been the ward of the blacksmith Kuznetsov and that she was really the daughter of an ancient Polish noble family called the Kovalevskys, from the western provinces.
⁸⁰
The fiction was in part to distinguish Dmitry’s claim from that of all the older sons he had begotten with various serf women (there were six in all, as far as one can tell from the many claims).
⁸¹
But it was also uncannily like the denouement of a comic opera - it was in fact the ending of
Anyuta
- where the servant girl in love with the nobleman is finally allowed to marry him, at which point it is revealed that she is, after all, of noble origins and had only been adopted by her humble parents as an orphaned little girl. The count, it seems, was attempting to tie up the ends of his own life as if it was a work of art.

    Praskovya was blessed with a rare intelligence and strength of character. She was the finest singer in the Russia of her day, literate and conversant with several languages. Yet until a year before her death she remained a serf. What were her feelings? How did she respond to the prejudice she met? How did she reconcile her deep religious faith, her acceptance of the sin of sexual relations outside marriage, with her feelings for the count? It is very seldom that one gets the chance to hear the confession of a serf. But in 1863 a document was

    found among the papers of the recently deceased Tatyana Shlykova, the opera singer (Sheremetev’s ‘Garnet’) and Praskovya’s lifelong friend, who had raised Dmitry, as if her own son, at the Fountain House after 1803. The document, in Praskovya’s own neat hand, was written in the form of a ‘prayer’ to God, clearly in the knowledge that she was about to die. It was handed by Praskovya to her friend before her death with instructions not to let the count see it. The language of the prayer is disjointed and obscure, its mood delirious with guilt and repentance, but the intense cry for salvation is unmistakable:

    … O merciful Lord, the source of all goodness and endless charity, I confess to you my sins and place before your eyes all my sinful and unlawful deeds. I have sinned, my Lord, and my illness, all these scabs upon my body, is a heavy punishment. I bear a heavy labour and my naked body is defiled. My body is defiled by sinful bonds and thoughts. I am bad. I am proud. I am ugly and lascivious. A devil is inside my body. Cry, my angel, my soul has died. It is in a coffin, lying unconscious and oppressed by bitterness, because, my Lord, my base and unlawful deeds have killed my soul. But compared with my sins the power of my Lord is very great, greater than the sand in all the seas, and from the depths of my despair I beg you, Lord Almighty, do not reject me. I am begging for your blessing. I am praying for your mercy. Punish me, my Lord, but please don’t let me die.
⁸²

    The musical life of eighteenth-century Russia was dominated by the court and by small private theatres such as Sheremetev’s. Public theatres, which were long-established in the towns of western Europe, did not really feature in the cultural life of Russia until the 1780s. The aristocracy preferred their own society and they rarely attended the public theatres, which catered mainly to the clerks and traders of the towns with vaudevilles and comic operas. ‘In our day,’ one Princess Yankova recalled, ‘it was considered more refined to go [to the theatre] by the personal invitation of the host, and not to one where anyone could go in exchange for money. And who indeed among our intimate friends did not possess his own private theatre?’
⁸³

    There were serf theatres on 173 estates, and serf orchestras on 300 estates, between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries.
⁸⁴
Besides the Sheremetevs, the Goncharovs, the Saltykovs, the Orlovs and Shepelevs, the Tolstoys and Nashchokins all had large serf troupes and separate theatre buildings that could be compared with the court theatres of Catherine the Great (the Hermitage Theatre in the Winter Palace and the Chinese Theatre at Tsarskoe Selo) from which they took their cue. Catherine set the pattern for the theatre in Russia. She herself wrote plays and comic operas; she began the fashion for the high French style in the Russian theatre; and it was she who first advanced the Enlightenment idea of the theatre as a school of public manners and sensibilities. The serf theatre played a central role on the noble estate during Catherine’s reign.

    In 1762, the Empress liberated the nobility from compulsory service to the state. She wanted her nobility to resemble a European one. It was a turning point in the cultural history of the aristocracy. Relieved of their stately duties, many noblemen retired to the country and developed their estates. The decades following the emancipation of the nobility were the golden age of the pleasure palace, with galleries for art, exquisite parks and gardens, orchestras and theatres appearing for the first time in the Russian countryside. The estate became much more than just an economic unit or living space. It became an island of European culture on Russian peasant soil.

    The Sheremetev serf troupe was the most important theatre of its kind, and it played a major role in the development of the Russian opera. It was ranked on a level with the court theatre in Petersburg and was considered far superior to the leading company in Moscow, whose theatre was located on the site of the Bolshoi Theatre today. The Moscow theatre’s English director, Michael Meddox, complained that Kuskovo, which did not charge admission, had deprived his theatre of an audience.
⁸⁵
Pyotr Sheremetev had established the serf troupe at Kuskovo in the 1760s. He was not an artistic man, but the theatre was a fashionable addition to his grand estate and it enabled him to entertain the court. In 1775 the Empress Catherine attended a performance of the French opera in the open-air theatre at Kuskovo. This encouraged Sheremetev to build a proper theatre, large enough to stage the foreign operas so beloved by the Empress, between 1777

    and 1787. He left its direction to his son, Count Nikolai Petrovich, who was well acquainted with the French and Italian opera from his European travels in the early 1770s. Nikolai trained his serf performers in the disciplined techniques of the Paris Opera. Peasants were selected at an early age from his various estates and trained as musicians for the theatre orchestra or as singers for the troupe. There was also a German who taught the violin, a French singing teacher, a language instructor in Italian and French, a Russian choir master, and several foreign ballet masters, most of them from the court. The Sheremetev theatre was the first in Russia to stage ballets on their own, rather than as part of an opera, as was common in the eighteenth century. Under the direction of Nikolai Petrovich it produced over twenty French and Russian ballets, many of them receiving their first performance in Russia, long before they were put on at court.
⁸⁶
The Russian ballet was born at Kuskovo.

    So, too, was the Russian opera. The Sheremetev theatre began the practice of performing operas in Russian, which stimulated the composition of native works. The earliest,
Anyuta
(premiered at Tsarskoe Selo in 1772.), was produced at Kuskovo in 1781; and
Misfortune from a Carriage
by Vasily Pashkevich, with a libretto by Kniazhnin (first put on at the Hermitage Theatre in 1779) was seen at Kuskovo within a year.* Before the final quarter of the eighteenth century, opera was imported from abroad. Italians made the running early on. Giovanni Ristori’s
Calandro
was performed by a group of Italian singers from the Dresden court in 1731. The Empress Anna, enchanted by this ‘exotic and irrational entertainment’, recruited Francesco Araia’s Venetian company to entertain her court in Petersburg, which staged
La Forza dell’amore
in the Winter Palace on the Empress’s birthday in 1736. Starting with Araia, Italians occupied the post of
maestro di capella
at the Imperial court, with just two exceptions, until the nineteenth century. Consequently, the first Russian composers were strongly influenced by the Italian style. Maxim Berezovsky, Dmitry Bortnyansky and Yevstignei Fomin were all taught by the Italians of St Petersburg, and then sent to study in Italy itself.

    * Stepan Degterov, the composer of
Minin and Pozharsky
(1811), was a former Sheremetev serf.

    Berezovsky was Mozart’s fellow student in the composition school of Padre Martini.*

    The love affair between Petersburg and Venice was continued by Glinka, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky. It was ironically a Venetian, Catterino Cavos, who pioneered the Russian national opera. Cavos came to Petersburg in 1798 and immediately fell in love with the city, which reminded him of his native town. In 1803 the Emperor Alexander took control of the public theatres and placed Cavos in charge of the Bolshoi Kamenny, until then the only public opera house and exclusively reserved for Italian opera. Cavos built the Bolshoi Kamenny into a stronghold of Russian opera. He wrote works such as
Ilya Bogatyr
(1807) on heroic national themes with librettos in Russian, and his music was strongly influenced by Russian and Ukrainian folk songs. Much of Glinka’s operatic music, which the nationalists would champion as the foundation of the Russian tradition, was in fact anticipated by Cavos. The ‘national character’ of Russian music was thus first developed by a foreigner.+

    The French were also instrumental in the development of a distinctive Russian musical style. Catherine the Great had invited a French opera troupe to the Petersburg court as one of her first acts on the assumption of the throne in 1762. During her reign the court opera was among the best in Europe. It staged the premiere of several major works, including Giovanni Paisiello’s
Il barbiere di Siviglia
(1782). The French comic opera, with its rustic village setting and its reliance on folk dialect and music, was a major influence on early Russian operas and
Singspiels
like
Anyuta
(similar to Favart’s
Annette et

*
Berezovsky was elected to the Accademia Philharmonica in Bologna. He returned to Russia in 1775 and, two years later, committed suicide. Tarkovsky’s film
Nostalgia
(1983) is a commentary on exile as told through the story of Berezovsky’s life. It tells of a Russian emigre in Italy engaged in research on his
doppelganger
and fellow countryman, an ill-fated eighteenth-century Russian composer.

    + This was not the end of the Cavos connection with the Russian opera. Catterino’s son, the architect Alberto Cavos, redesigned the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow after it was burned down in 1853. He also built the Marinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. His daughter, Camille Cavos, married the court architect and portrait painter Nikolai Benois, whose family had fled to St Petersburg from the French Revolution in the 1790s, and their son, Alexander Benois, established the Ballets Russes with Sergei Diaghilev.

Lubin), St Petersburg Bazaar
and
The Miller Magician
(based on Rousseau’s
Le devin du village).
These operas were the staple of the Sheremetev repertoire: huge numbers of them were performed at Kuskovo and Ostankino. With their comic peasant characters and their stylized motifs from folk song, they gave voice to an emerging Russian national consciousness.

    One of the earliest Russian operas was specially commissioned by the Sheremetevs for the open-air theatre at Kuskovo in 1781.
Green with Jealousy, or The Boatman from Kuskovo
was a panegyric to the Sheremetev palace and its park, which served as a backdrop to the opera on the stage.
⁸⁷
The production was a perfect illustration of the way in which the palace had itself become a kind of theatre for the acting out of Russian noble life, a huge stage set for the display of wealth and European ways.

    The design and the decor of the palace and its park contained much theatricality. The high stone archway into the estate marked the entrance into another world. The landscaped gardens and the manor house were laid out, like the props upon a stage, to create a certain emotion or theatrical effect. Features such as sculptured ‘peasants’ or ‘cattle’ in the woods, or temples, lakes and grottoes in the English park, intensified this sense of being in a place of make-believe.
⁸⁸
Kuskovo was full of dramatic artifice. The main house was made of wood that was carved to look like stone. In the park Fedor Argunov’s extraordinary grotto pavilion was full of playfulness: its internal walls were lined with artificial shells and sea creatures; and (in a reference to the house in Petersburg) its baroque cupola was constructed in the form of a fountain.

    In its everyday routines and public entertainments the palace was a kind of theatre, too. The daily ceremonies of the nobleman - the rituals connected with his morning prayer, his breakfast, lunch and dinner, his dressing and undressing, his office work and hunting, his washing and his bed - were performed from a detailed script that needed to be learned by the master and a huge supporting cast of domestic serfs. Then there were certain social functions which served as an arena for the ritualized performance of cultivated ways, the salon or the ball where the nobles demonstrated their European manners and good taste. Women put on wigs and beauty spots. They were conscious of