The Magical Chorus

Then came the sensational news that Morozov was planning a new theater in St. Petersburg especially for Andreyeva, even more fabulous than the one he built for MAT. The press had a field day, relishing the story that the new enterprise would be a dangerous competitor for MAT, opening in the fall of 1905 with a sensational new play by Gorky. Stanislavsky wrote to his confidant: “Someone is spreading rumors in Moscow and the papers that we have a schism, that everything is collapsing, that I am leaving the Art Theater.”⁴¹

It all ended literally with a bang. On May 13, 1905, Savva Morozov shot himself in his hotel room in Nice. To aim accurately, he circled the heart on his chest with a marking pencil. Nervous breakdowns were not unusual in the Morozov family, but the official version of suicide after a severe depression is now considered suspect. Some suggest the Bolsheviks were involved, and Morozov’s family hinted that it was a murder: after all, Morozov had insured his life for one hundred thousand rubles (an enormous sum in those days), and he gave the bearer policy to Andreyeva, who turned the money over to the Bolsheviks immediately after his death.

As it happens, Morozov’s sudden death saved MAT. Without a sponsor, the planned competing theater in St. Petersburg did not materialize, Andreyeva quietly returned to MAT, and even Gorky, who had scornfully declared that he could not possibly give his new play to the Art Theater, reconsidered. His drama Children of the Sun premiered on October 24, 1904, at MAT, and it is remembered for the mayhem on the opening night.

At the time, the situation in Moscow, as elsewhere in Russia, was extremely tense. In 1904, Nicholas II declared war on Japan, a war intended to be brief and victorious but which ended eighteen months later in a humiliating defeat. Then on Sunday, January 9, 1905, a demonstration of thousands of workers who’d gone to the tsar’s palace with a petition of grievances ended when the army and police opened fire and killed many hundreds.

After that Bloody Sunday in St. Petersburg, mass strikes by workers in Moscow and other cities turned into street battles with police and soldiers. Under pressure of his advisors, the tsar reluctantly signed a manifesto on October 17, 1905, granting constitutional rights—freedom of speech, assembly, and political parties—and announced the creation of the first elective Russian parliament, the Duma.

The manifesto did not defuse the situation. The next day, October 18, Bauman, the Bolshevik who had hidden from the police at the apartment of the actress Andreyeva and was now a leader of the rebellion, was killed by a member of the Black Hundred, an ultranationalist right-wing populist organization. His funeral on October 20 turned into a mass demonstration in Moscow, the first in the city’s history. Gorky, who attended with Andreyeva, maintained that several hundred thousand people, “all of Moscow,” took part in the procession: workers, students, intellectuals, actors, and performers, including Stanislavsky, and the famous bass Fedor Chaliapin. There were more than one hundred fifty wreaths, including one from Gorky and Andreyeva: “To a fallen comrade.” When the demonstrators began to disperse, they were attacked by Cossacks and a mob of supporters of the tsar.

The last act of Gorky’s Children of the Sun at MAT depicted a riot: an infuriated crowd burst on stage, a shot was heard, and the hero, played by audience darling Vassily Kachalov, fell. Stanislavsky apparently had not expected this bit of stagecraft to be the equivalent of shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater. The audience at the premiere was edgy: they feared all kinds of provocations and even an attempt on the life of the author. The mob scene and shot seemed too real to the spectators, who perceived it as an attack by armed thugs on the actors. As Kachalov recalled: “The noise was incredible. Women had hysterics. Part of the public rushed to the stage, apparently in order to defend us. Others fled to safety. Some rushed to the coatroom, to get guns from their coat pockets. Some shouted: ‘Curtain!’”⁴²

The performance had to be interrupted. This may have been the first time in the history of Russian theater that art and politics became so intertwined that the audience could not tell where one ended and the other began.

Most of the Russian cultural elite was involved one way or another in the revolutionary tumult of 1905, and positions—as always in Russia—were quickly polarized. The poet Zinaida Hippius complained in her article “Choice of Sack” that Russia’s cultural figures were “divided in half and tied up in two sacks, one labeled ‘conservatives,’ the other, ‘liberals.’”⁴³ As soon as one enters the public arena and opens one’s mouth, Hippius grumbled, one is instantly thrown into one of the sacks. There is no way out.

Confrontation was not avoided even in music, traditionally the most apolitical of all cultural endeavors. The controversy centered on the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who was Russia’s most influential musician after Tchaikovsky’s death in 1893.

At the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where Rimsky-Korsakov was an esteemed professor, a deadlock developed after Bloody Sunday. A student in the military band boasted that he had participated in the shooting of the workers. Other students were outraged and demanded his expulsion. The administration balked. When Rimsky-Korsakov, whose political views had taken on a “bright-red shade,” as he put it, supported the student demands, the composer was fired from the staff.

This hasty step by the supervising officials once again showed the political shortsightedness typical of Russian cultural bureaucrats. The firing of Rimsky-Korsakov quickly became a newspaper scandal and outraged the public: the composer received piles of letters and telegrams of support from all over the country, even from people who had not heard of him before that. Peasants collected money to aid “the musician who suffered for the people.” Rimsky-Korsakov became a national hero.

The influential St. Petersburg newspaper Novosti, in an article sarcastically headlined “How We Support Talent,” added a composer’s name for the first time in Russian history to a list of political victims of the tsarist regime. “We drove Pushkin to a suicidal duel. We sent Lermontov to face bullets. We sentenced Dostoevsky to hard labor. We buried Chernyshevsky alive in a polar grave. We exiled one of our greatest minds, Herzen. We expatriated Turgenev. We excommunicated and denounced Tolstoy. We expelled Rimsky-Korsakov from the conservatory.”⁴⁴

The culmination of the confrontation with the regime came with the St. Petersburg premiere of Rimsky- Korsakov’s one-act opera Kashchei the Immortal, composed in 1902. It was an obvious political allegory, in which Kashchei, the evil sorcerer of Russian folk tales, is vanquished by the power of love. The musical fairy tale was a genre in which Rimsky-Korsakov, a master of national idiom and opulent orchestral writing, had no peers. But Kashchei was an unusual experiment for him, where the composer, known for his dislike of the innovations of Debussy and Richard Strauss, unexpectedly embraced musical modernism, adding strange harmonies and impressionistic colors, so strong were his political emotions.

The production of Kashchei, performed on March 27, 1905, by the students of the same conservatory from which the composer had been fired, turned into an event that was described by a newspaper as “an unprecedented, colossal, overwhelming public demonstration. The beloved artist was blanketed by flowers, greens, bouquets.”⁴⁵ The authorities acted foolishly here, too. When shouts from the audience called “Down with autocracy!” the police lowered the fire curtain with such alacrity that it almost squashed sixty-one-year-old Rimsky-Korsakov, who was onstage taking his bows. On orders from the governor general of St. Petersburg, Dmitri Trepov (who would soon order the troops suppressing riots: “No warning shots and don’t be stingy with the bullets!”), the audience was chased out of the hall. No wonder that twenty-three- year-old Igor Stravinsky, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, wrote to his teacher’s son in 1905 with uncharacteristic radical fire: “Damned kingdom of mental hooligans and obscurantism! The Devil take them!”⁴⁶ and went on in unprintable language.