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Scene from the ballet La Esmeralda. Leningrad. City Theatre. 1942–1943
For the siege theatre the last premiere had been La Esmeralda, staged at the Comedy Theatre on 18 December 1942.
The production was revived by Olga Iordan, who was combining her duties as Artistic Director of the ballet company, ballerina, choreographer, teacher and coach. For the basis of her production she took the Perrot-Petipa version which had existed until that of Agrippina Vaganova in 1935. The production had three scenes and the tragic ending was omitted. Onstage the lack of men could be sensed. Performers of the Musical Comedy Theatre were invited for the roles of Quasimodo and the chief vagrant Clopin Trouillefou. “There are no men even for mime roles,” Nikolai Kondratiev who was at the premiere noted in his diary, “and depicting the modest number of police constables (there were just two) on their night-time beat of the streets and squares of Paris, scattering the crowd from the square and beating Quasimodo, fell to women dressed in male costumes.”
“The class is not heated,” wrote Olga Iordan in her diary, “the corps de ballet and non-dancing characters did not remove their street clothes at the rehearsal; they danced, or rather they made the movements in fur coats, felt boots and gloves. They also did arabesques like that. (...) “We faced another difficult problem: footwear... They wore out quickly and the dancers had to repair them themselves. They were darned and patched with fragments of silk ribbon found at home... And yet not one performance was performed en demi-pointe, everyone danced en-pointe. It was a struggle, but we danced. When rehearsals were moved to the stage we were faced with new difficulties. The orchestra pit – intended for plays – could not accommodate even the small orchestra we had at our disposal. We had to expand it, removing the first two rows of the stalls. On the stage along the footlights there was a concrete block for the iron curtain – we had to pin it together and fill up the cracks with boards. All that work was done by the workers of the Kirov Theatre under the guidance of Alexander Belyakov (Alexander Belyakov was initially the Assistant Director and later the Deputy Director of the theatre – Ed.).”
Quote after: A. Kryukov. Music during the Siege. Chronicle. Leningrad: Kompozitor, 2002. P. 266
O. Iordan. From diaries // Leningrad Theatres during the Great Patriotic War. Moscow-Leningrad. Iskusstvo. 1948. PP 505–506