First Decades
In 1806, the government of Alexander I established the Imperial Moscow Theatre in place of the former Petrovsky. The new theatre consolidated actors from state and private companies into the unified state company, buying out serf actors from their private owners (among them Stepan Mochalov and his five-year-old son Pavel Mochalov). Alexander himself joined the trading, pressing reluctant slave owners to cut down their prices. The new company officially premiered April 11, 1808 at the Pashkov House with a double act of Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni and Poverty and Chivalry by August von Kotzebue. For the next two or three decades, foreign plays dominated the program. Kotzebue, particularly, was favored for his ability to "enchant" the audience.
Carlo Rossi designed the new building, built in wood on Arbat Square. The new Arbatsky Theatre opened April 10, 1808, with Bayan by Sergey Glinka. In 1812, when Napoleon's forces approached Moscow, governor Fyodor Rostopchin delayed evacuation of the company until the last moment: actors fled in disarray when Moscow was already ablaze. Some died on the road, some joined Saint Petersburg companies, and others returned to Moscow in 1813. Arbatsky Theatre had burned down, and the company performed in Apraksin House on Znamenka Street and, since 1818, in Pashkov House.
In 1820, the state began redevelopment of Theatre Square. Joseph Bove designed a grand opera theatre (the future Bolshoy) on the site of former Petrovsky with four identical buildings around it. One of these, the Vargin House, was built with a small theatre hall which the Imperial Theatre leased for its drama company. The owner of the buildings, caught in the politics of war minister Alexander Chernyshyov, soon went broke and ended up in jail. and by 1830, the state had bought out the property.
January 5, 1823, Alexander I created a new Moscow Board of Theatres that reported to Moscow's governor, making Moscow theatre independent from the Saint Petersburg board. Governor Dmitry Golitsyn became an influential fundraiser for the theatre and arranged emancipation of serf actors. In the same year, future stars Mikhail Shchepkin and Pavel Mochalov joined the company, immediately receiving top billings. Later, in the 1830s, cast hiring was influenced by Shchepkin, who hired and mentored future stars Prov Sadovsky and Ivan Samarin.
The smaller stage in Vargin House (Maly) opened October 14, 1824 with Alexey Verstovsky's Lily of Narbonne. The larger Bolshoy opened on January 6, 1825. The name Maly (small) emerged in the same year, and referred specifically to the building and not the company. Bolshoy and Maly theatres were run as a single company (Imperial Moscow Theatre), sharing an orchestra, choir, ballet, and even props. Standard weekly programs for Maly in 1825 included three German, two French, and one "German or French" daily slots, with just one Friday night open to Russian plays. Thursdays and Fridays at Bolshoy were reserved for "light comedy" or musical genres. Thus, popular drama was regularly performed at the Bolshoy stage, alone or bundled with opera and ballet. For example, the January 31, 1828 night at Bolshoy stage for the benefit of Mikhail Shchepkin featured The Robbers by Friedrich Schiller, a single-act French opera, and a "vaudeville ballet by Alexander Shakhovskoy in rhyme and free verse with machines, flooding of the entire theatre, diverse dancing and music compiled from folk songs".
In the second quarter of the century native Russian plays gradually increased their share. Maly performances included works by Vasily Zhukovsky, Alexander Griboyedov (Woe from Wit 1831 featuring both Shchepkin and Pavel Mochalov). Alexander Pushkin (Ruslan and Ludmila 1825, The Fountain of Bakhchisaray 1827, The Gypsies 1832) and lesser known, now forgotten authors. In three decades, from the 1820s to the 1840s, the theater shed the over-dramatization of vaudeville and romanticism and replaced it with "something approaching a realistic style we would recognize today." The former Vargin House was expanded to its present size by Konstantin Thon between 1838 and 1840. The new stage allowed use of elaborate box sets that became standard practice at Maly, while Bolshoy conservatively relied on primitive wing-and-border cloth sets.
Read more about this topic: Maly Theatre (Moscow), History
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