Michael Maddox

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Michael Maddox (1747-1822) (also referred to as Medoks, Maddoksa, Maddocks, Mattocks) was an English entrepreneur and theatre manager. He was co-founder, with Prince Urusov, of the Petrovsky Theatre, the first permanent theatre in Moscow, later the Bolshoi Theatre. It is unclear whether he was related to Anthony Maddox the successful slack-wire and theatre performer. There exists a possibility of confusion between the two with regard to references to equilibrism. Anthony Maddox drowned on a sea voyage to Dublin in 1758 along with Theophilus Cibber.

Described as a famous equilibrist, Michael Maddox arrived first in Russia in 1766 as the manager of a museum of 'mechanical and physical representations', visiting both St Petersburg and Moscow. Leaving Russia he travelled to Madrid with his museum, and spent time in London in the ensuing decade. On returning to Russia before 1776 he was taken into partnership in the theatre company formed that year by the Moscow Prosecutor, Prince Urusov. Maddox had had an established record of success at the Haymarket Theatre, London where it is said that in 1770 his were the most prosperous entertainments ever carried on in that house. His profits in one season are stated to have amounted to £11,000, being £2,500 more than David Garrick's a few years earlier.¹

Urusov had been granted a ten-year licence for theatrical and other performances. For four years they enjoyed success in a wooden theatre at Znamenka before it burnt down in early 1780. Maddox then bought his share of the company from Prince Urusov and employed architect Christian Rosberg the same year to construct a new brick and stone building that faced Petrovka Street. It thus became known as the Petrovsky theatre. Maddox obtained a further ten-year licence from Prince Dolgoruky-Krimsky, but financial difficulties meant that ownership of the theatre passed to the Office of Imperial Theatres in 1792. Empress Maria Feodorovna granted Maddox a life-long pension of 3,000 roubles for his contribution to the creation of Russian theatre. The theatre remained until 1805, when it burned down just before a performance of Ferdinand Kauer's Rusalka. (It was later replaced by the Bolshoi theatre on the same site.)

a. Petrovsky Theatre, including the extension which contained a rotunda.

b. Interior of Rotunda/Masquerade hall. c. Interior of Theatre/Opera house

d. Relative size and situation of Petrovsky theatre and Bolshoi. e. Plan of 2nd floor with rotunda and theatre.

Maddox Theatre Company

The Maddox troupe delivered 425 performances of drama, ballet and opera during this time. These included more than 100 different operas, mainly of the comic opera/opéra comique type by composers such as Grétry, Dalayrac, Mehul, Paisiello, Philidor and Martin y Soler, as well as Russians such as Yevstigney Fomin and Vasily Pashkevich. The foreign operas were largely performed in Russian translations by S. N. Glinka, Levshin, Dmitrievsky and others. Three notable melodramas (Fomin's Orfeo, G. A. Benda's Pygmalion and Medea & Jason), were part of the repertoire. Theatre productions included Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet and Voltaire's Mahomet ou le Fanatisme.

Masquerades for 1,500 people or more, where carnival costume was compulsory, were held in the mirror-bedecked rotunda. From 1783, Maddox also constructed and ran a Vauxhall Gardens (Vokzal/Воксал) enterprise concurrently in the Moscow suburbs, where operas and plays were performed from mid-May to September. It is likely that he and his wife retained ownership of this after the Petrovsky was taken on by the Office of Imperial Theatres.

Musical Directors:

Stabinger, Matthias. 1782, 1785-

Pozzi, Carlo. 178?-

Blyma, Franz Xaver. 1799-1800

Kerzelli, Ivan. 1801-

(from New Grove Dictionary)

Miscellaneous:

Maddox manufactured a tower clock for Empress Catherine II of Russia, which is currently displayed in the Armoury Museum in the Moscow Kremlin.

He married a German woman from an aristocratic family and fathered eleven children, one of them the adventurer Roman Medoks. His wife survived him and continued with ownership of some theatrical buildings.

The suggestions that he was a Professor of Mathematics from Oxford University and that he had tutored the Tsarevich Pavel prior to moving to Moscow have not been substantiated.

Source: Olga Chayanova 'Teatr Maddoksa b Moskve 1776-1805' pub. 1927

¹ Old and New London Volume 4 1878 pp 216-226

External link: http://russlandonline.ru/bolschoi/morenews.php?iditem=27