Short answers, pulled from the story.
The year 1783 marked the birth of a permanent theatre company in Saint Petersburg, established by Catherine the Great. Architect Antonio Rinaldi designed the Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre to open that same year on Carousel Square.
Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov premiered here in 1874 and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky followed with The Queen of Spades in 1890 and Iolanta in 1892. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov presented The Golden Cockerel in 1909 within these walls.
In 1935 officials named it the Kirov State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet to honor Sergei Kirov, an assassinated Communist Party leader born in 1886 and killed in 1934. The original name returned as the State Academic Mariinsky Theatre in 1992 after the Soviet collapse.
Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina emerged as international stars from these halls while Vaslav Nijinsky and George Balanchine also studied here before achieving global fame. Rudolf Nureyev and Natalia Makarova followed their footsteps into legendary status alongside Mikhail Baryshnikov.
A new concert hall designed by French architect Xavier Fabre opened in spring 2007 following construction on Mariinsky II that began in 2003. Construction finished in May 2013 at a cost of 500 million euros with 1,830 seats.