Composers Inspiration

Muses and Musings

The Red Poppy
Reinhold Glière and Yekaterina Geltzer
by Georg Predota March 24th, 2016

Yekaterina Vasilyevna Geltzer was a prima ballerina of the

famous Bolshoi Ballet, who danced in the theatre from 1898 to
1935. Her father Vasily was an outstanding mime dance and
director at the theater, but he believed that his daughter’s
physique was unsuitable for dancing. Yekaterina put up a fight,
and finally persuaded her father to enroll her in the Bolshoi ballet
school. She developed strong pointe and pirouette technique
and gradually worked her way up in the Bolshoi organization.
However, political trouble was brewing and the Bolshevik
Revolution took a dim view of the imperial theaters. Ballet had
been an entertainment for the elites of imperial Russia. “Of all
stage arts inherited from the past, ballet bore the largest quantity
of ‘birth-marks’ of the exploitative society. That incontestable fact
was preserved in the memory of each and everyone.” Ballet
companies had to cope with a mass exodus of leading figures of Purple Flower – Yekaterina Gletzer and
Vasiliy Tokhomirov
the stage, but also defend against grassroots Communist voices
that decried ballet as an artificial, frivolous art form, a decadent playground for grand dukes
hopelessly out of touch with reality. Yet gradually, government policy opened the former
bastions of imperial high culture to the masses, making ballet performances available to a
wider audience by distributing free or subsidized tickets. Under constant threat of closure, it
was Yekaterina Geltzer, among others, who “helped preserve and pass on the classical
technique and repertory of the Imperial Russian Ballet after the 1917 Revolution.

In order to secure the survival of the Russian ballet

tradition, repertoire needed to radically reflect the spirit of
the revolution. In 1925, the Bolshoi was holding a contest
for the best modern ballet, and Reinhold Glière—inspired
by Geltzer’s phenomenal performances—decided to join
the competition. He initially searched hard and wide for a
suitable subject, but nothing came to mind. By pure chance,
he stumbled across a story published in Pravda, telling the
saga about a Soviet ship with food supplies impounded in
China. Glière engaged the librettist Mikhail Kurilko to write a
scenario within the aesthetic constraints of socialist realism.
Set in a port in Kuomintang China in the 1920’s, The Red
Poppy eventually became the first truly Soviet ballet. The
story tells of the love between a Soviet sailor and a Chinese
girl, who is eventually killed by the sailor’s capitalist rival. Reinhold Glière

The tyrannical British imperialist commander of the port sanctions her murder, as Tao-Hoa
tries to escape her homeland on board a Soviet ship. As she falls dying, she gives her
compatriots a red poppy as an emblem in their fight for freedom. (She had previously given a
red poppy to the Soviet Captain as a symbol of her love). Tellingly, the Soviet authorities
changed the name of the ballet to The Red Flower” in 1949, hoping to avoid any mistaken
association with the opium trade.
The ballet premiered at the Bolshoi on 14 June 1927 and
was an overwhelming success. Geltzer’s performance as the
Chinese girl Tao-Hoa was judged to have been
extraordinary, and she was eventually awarded the Stalin
Prize, the Order of Lenin and the Order of the Red Banner of
Labor. Glière was named a People’s Artist of the Soviet
Union and never had problems with Soviet authorities.
Politically neutral, his conservative style of music, often
based on folk styles of the various Soviet republics, was
perfectly in keeping with Soviet aesthetics. Glière eventually
extracted an orchestral suite, and the concluding “Russian
Sailors Dance” is probably his best-know musical
composition. This robust and satisfying dance is based on a
Russian folk-tune and provides a number of variations,
ranging from serious to frantic!

Yekaterina Geltzer