Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian Ballet from the Rule of the Tsars to Today

Written by Simon Morrison

Narrated by Dugald Bruce-Lockhart

On a freezing night in January 2013, an assailant hurled acid in the face of the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, Sergei Filin. The crime, organized by a lead soloist, dragged one of Russia’s most illustrious institutions into scandal.

Under Vladimir Putin, the Bolshoi Theatre has been called on to preserve Russia’s lengthy artistic legacy and to mirror its neo-imperial ambitions. As renowned musicologist Simon Morrison shows in his tour-de-force account, the attack, and its torrid aftermath, underscored the importance of the Bolshoi to the art of ballet, to Russia, and to the world.

With exclusive access to state archives and private sources, Morrison sweeps us through the history of the ballet, 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, the Bolshoi became a point of pride for the tsarist empire after the defeat of Napoleon in 1812.
After the revolution, Moscow was transformed into a global capital; meetings of the Communist Party were hosted at the Bolshoi, and the Soviet Union was signed into existence on its stage. Recently, a £450 million restoration has returned the Bolshoi to its former glory, even as prized talent has departed.

The Theatre has been bombed, rigged with explosives and reinforced with cement. Its dancers have suffered unimaginable physical torment to climb the ranks. But, as Morrison reveals, 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Release date: Oct 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9780008141042

Simon Morrison

Simon Morrison is a professor of music at Princeton University, a contributor to the New York Times and the New York Review of Books, and the author of, most recently, The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Reviews for Bolshoi Confidential

[vguy_6 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Bit too long and hard work keeping track of all those names - like a Russian novel! But a fair amount of well-researched stories that takes it above the gossip level. What remains? The story of Plisetskaya's elbowing her way to the top, playing the Soviet system note-perfect. And why the modernising, worker-orientated Communists kept those aristo-bourgeois shows in the repertoire but made so few about tractors and Stakhanovites. Seems they could never agree on the correct marxist message: new ideas died in the committee rooms. And of course there was hard currency potential in Swan Lake and the like. Nonetheless the ballet discipline remains, and the vicious competition behind the scenes.

[eyejaybee · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This was one of those books that was so nearly very good, but somehow the author just kept missing open goals, snatching a work of mediocrity from the cusp of success. The basic premise was certainly enticing. In January 2013, Sergei Filin, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet was attacked in a Moscow street. This prompted considerable interest throughout Russia, dominating the press for several weeks, before it emerged that the attack had been organised by a former dancer in the Bolshoi, driven by years of resentment and jealousies seething within the company.Simon Morrison uses this incident as the launching point for a history of the Bolshoi Ballet since its foundation in 1776, as if to demonstrate that this was merely the latest in a long series of such scandals. I found this rather contrived, however, and felt that he was struggling to spin a story out of rather weak material. A simple history of the ballet company without the search for recurrent scandal would have been far more interesting.

[cygnet81 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Mostly about how the politics of Russian interfered with the art.