Bolshoi Theatre

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bolshoi Theatre is a historic opera house in Moscow, Russia, and its neoclassical façade appears on the Russian 100-ruble banknote. More than 200 dancers perform under its roof, making its ballet company the largest of its kind anywhere on Earth. A building recognizable enough to appear on currency did not arrive that way by accident. What did it take to keep a single institution standing across fires, revolutions, world wars, and a six-year, government-funded rebuild? Who were the dancers, conductors, and composers who built its reputation, and what price, financial and otherwise, has that reputation carried?

• 2. Origins and Repeated Fires

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  Catherine II granted Prince Peter Vasilyevich Urusov a license to organize theatrical performances, balls, and other forms of entertainment in Moscow. Urusov partnered with Michael Maddox, an English tightrope walker, to bring the venture to life. Their earliest performances took place inside a private home before the pair acquired the Petrovka Theatre. On the 30th of December 1780, that venue began staging plays and operas, establishing what would grow into the Bolshoi Theatre.

  Fire destroyed the Petrovka Theatre on the 8th of October 1805. A replacement, the New Arbat Imperial Theatre, opened on the 13th of April 1808. It burned down again during the French invasion of Moscow in 1812.

  Construction on the theatre Moscow would come to recognize began in 1821 and finished in 1824, led by architect Joseph Bové. Bové's plan replaced an earlier competition-winning design by the Petersburg architect Andrei Mikhailov, which had been judged too expensive to build. The finished building opened on the 18th of January 1825 as the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theatre. Its opening performance was Cendrillon, a ballet by the Catalan composer Fernando Sor. Its early repertoire stayed exclusively Russian until foreign composers began appearing on the bill around 1840.

  Within a few decades, fire would test the building all over again.

• 3. Reconstruction Through the Soviet Century

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  In 1843, architect A. Nikitin carried out a large-scale reconstruction of the theatre. A decade later, in 1853, a fire tore through the building and caused extensive damage. Alberto Cavos, son of the opera composer Catterino Cavos, took charge of rebuilding it.

  On the 7th of December 1919, the theatre was renamed the State Academic Bolshoi Theatre. Just five days later, on the 12th of December, officials made an unsuccessful attempt to shut the institution down entirely. The Beethoven Hall opened within the complex on the 18th of February 1921, and architect Ivan Rerberg directed a further reconstruction between 1921 and 1923.

  A bomb struck the structure during World War II, though the damage was later repaired.

  Decades later, the theatre would need more than repair. It would need an entirely new stage.

• 4. New Stage and Modern Rebuild

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  A New Stage for the Bolshoi Theatre went into service on the 29th of November 2002. It was built just to the left of the historic main building. Combined with a restored 17th-century structure, two rehearsal halls, and rooms for the artists, it formed a single complex. That complex became known as the Bolshoi Theatre of Russia. The new structure sat on a natural hill it shared, until recently, with blocks of old houses containing communal apartments.

  From July 2005 to October 2011, the main theatre closed entirely for restoration. Its architecture blended three different styles, and the building had grown damaged enough that a fast renovation looked necessary. Engineers initially estimated repairs at 15 billion rubles, about $610 million, but inspection found that more than 75 percent of the structure was unstable.

  The federal government funded the entire rebuild. While the main house stayed shut, the company kept performing on the New Stage and on the stage of the Great Kremlin Palace. Workers restored acoustics that had degraded during the Soviet era and returned the original imperial decor to the building.

  The theatre reopened on the 28th of October 2011 with a concert featuring international artists alongside the resident ballet and opera companies. Its new maximum capacity reached 1,740 seats. The first fully staged opera to follow, not long after, was Ruslan and Lyudmila.

  That reopening night pointed backward too, toward premieres the Bolshoi had staged generations earlier, long before any renovation.

• 5. Landmark Premieres and Notable Nights

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  Pyotr Tchaikovsky's operas The Voyevoda and Mazeppa both premiered on the Bolshoi stage. Modest Mussorgsky's version of Boris Godunov was given there on the 16th of December 1888.

  Sergei Rachmaninoff's Aleko and Francesca da Rimini also had their first performances at the theatre. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Maid of Pskov premiered there as well, with singer Feodor Chaliapin performing the role of Ivan the Terrible.

  Dmitri Shostakovich's opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District premiered at the Bolshoi in 1935.

  The Bolshoi Orchestra gave its first symphonic concert inside the theatre on the 4th of May 1919, conducted by Serge Koussevitzky. Decades later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, at least 34 members of the theatre were infected.

  The company behind those premieres relied just as heavily on its dancers, whose reputation would eventually cross borders no opera could reach on its own.

• 6. Ballet, Touring, and Defection

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  Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake premiered at the theatre on the 4th of March 1877. Yuri Fayer served as chief ballet conductor from 1923 to 1963.

  The Bolshoi operates as a repertory theatre, meaning it draws each night's program from a running list of productions. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the company has made several attempts to lessen its traditional reliance on large state subsidies.

  After the death of Joseph Stalin, the company began touring internationally. Those tours became a source of cultural prestige and foreign currency earnings for the Soviet state. Through them, the name Bolshoi Ballet became widely recognized across the West.

  On the 23rd of August 1979, dancer Alexander Godunov defected while the Bolshoi toured abroad. Leonid Kozlov and Valentina Kozlova followed on the 16th of September 1979, with further defections in the years after. The company has continued touring regularly with opera and ballet productions through the post-Soviet era.

  Until the mid-1990s, most foreign operas at the Bolshoi were sung in Russian. Italian and other languages have appeared on its stage more frequently in recent years.

  Behind the dancers stood a rotating line of conductors. Some left under far less dramatic circumstances than a defection, and others under far more political ones.

• 7. Conductors in Transition

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  Gennady Rozhdestvensky led the Bolshoi's orchestra twice, first from 1965 to 1970 and again from 2000 to 2001. Alexander Vedernikov then held the position from 2001 to 2009.

  Music director and chief conductor Vassily Sinaisky quit abruptly at the start of December 2013. His tenure had lasted 41 months, and he cited a need to avoid conflict. General director Vladimir Urin accepted his resignation and chose Tugan Sokhiev as his replacement. Sokhiev's four-year contract was settled on the 20th of January 2014 and took effect immediately.

  Sokhiev left his position in connection with the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In December 2023, Valery Gergiev was appointed artistic director with immediate effect, signing an initial contract of five years.

  Gergiev's appointment placed a new name at the head of a company whose reputation, both on stage and off it, had rarely gone unquestioned.

• 8. Scandal Behind the Curtain

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  The Bolshoi draws large numbers of tourists to Moscow, and ticket prices there often run far higher than at other Russian theatres.

  Officials placed the renovation's final cost at 21 billion rubles, about $688 million, though other accounts describe far more being spent. The rebuilding and renovation reached $1.1 billion by some estimates, sixteen times the original projection. In 2009, prosecutors alleged that the lead contractor had been paid three times over for the same work.

  Anastasia Volochkova, a former Bolshoi prima ballerina, has described the theatre as feeling like 'a big brothel.' She has claimed that theatre administrators invited ballerinas to parties and refused them roles if they declined to attend.

  On the 17th of January 2013, Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi's ballet director, was attacked with sulfuric acid. He lost much of his eyesight as a result, and a male dancer was later charged with the crime.

  A theatre insider told the German publication Der Spiegel that tickets are often sold to mafia dealers. Those dealers resell them on the black market for double their face value. Former music director Alexander Vedernikov has criticized the theatre's performance quality, saying it puts 'bureaucratic interests before artistic ones.'

  On the 8th of July 2017, three days before its premiere, the Bolshoi called off a ballet about the dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Director General Vladimir Urin blamed poor quality in the dancing. Principal dancer Maria Alexandrova called it the first sign of a 'new era' of censorship. It was the first time a show had been pulled that way since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The cancellation left behind a question the theatre never fully answered, whether the decision came from artistic judgment or from somewhere higher up.