Mariinsky Theatre

• 1. Introduction

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  In the main entrance foyer of the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg, a marble-eyed bust of an empress greets every visitor. The house behind her has carried five official names. Its resident companies still trade under the name of a Soviet party leader. Inside, composers and choreographers launched works that became pillars of the Russian repertoire. Who was the empress, and who was Kirov? How did a stone theatre on a square once called Carousel Square lead to this house? Which dancers and conductors made its reputation abroad? And what does an old imperial institution look like after a modern building project and a political shock in 2022?

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• 2. Five Names

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  Empress Maria Alexandrovna, wife of Tsar Alexander II, is the person for whom the theatre is named. It opened in 1860 as the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, and it kept that title until 1920.

  The revolution removed the royal label. From 1920 to 1924 the house was the State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet. In 1924 Leningrad was added to the front of that name.

  Sergey Kirov lived from 1886 to 1934. He led the Leningrad Communist Party and was assassinated. In 1935 the theatre became the Kirov State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, one of numerous places and institutions renamed for him at that time. That name held until 1992, when the current State Academic Mariinsky Theatre title replaced it.

  Historical accounts often shorten the Soviet-era name to the acronym GATOB, which stands for the Russian words for State Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet. The building itself is commonly called the Mariinsky Theatre. The companies inside kept the Kirov name for brand recognition.

  Behind all these titles stood older buildings on the same square, and the site's story begins in 1783.

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• 3. The Stone Predecessor

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  In 1783, at the behest of Catherine the Great, Saint Petersburg gained an imperial troupe for drama, opera and ballet. An Italian ballet troupe had already performed at the Russian court since the early 18th century.

  The architect Antonio Rinaldi designed a permanent home for the new company, and it opened in 1783 as the Imperial Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre. It stood on Carousel Square, which was renamed Theatre Square in honour of the building. The two parts of its name were chosen to tell it apart from the wooden Little Theatre. Kamenny is the Russian word for stone, and Bolshoi means big.

  In 1836 the architect Albert Cavos renovated the Bolshoi Kamenny. He was the son of the opera composer Catterino Cavos. The renovated house served as the principal theatre of the Imperial Ballet and opera.

  On the 29th of January 1849, the Equestrian circus opened on Theatre Square. It was also the work of Cavos, and it was designed so that it could double as a theatre. Within a few decades, the older stone house would be judged unsafe.

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• 4. Premieres That Defined Russian Music

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  In 1886 the theatre director Ivan Vsevolozhsky arranged for the Imperial Ballet and the Imperial Opera to move to the Mariinsky Theatre. The Bolshoi Kamenny was by then considered unsafe. Vsevolozhsky ran the Imperial Theatres from 1881 to 1898.

  The Mariinsky and its predecessor hosted premieres of many operas by Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov was first staged there in 1874. Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades followed in 1890, and his Iolanta in 1892.

  Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Golden Cockerel was a notable production in 1909. The Soviet years added their own landmarks. The revised version of Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet premiered in 1940. Prokofiev's Cinderella followed in 1946, with Natalya Dudinskaya in the cast.

  Khachaturian's ballet Spartacus opened in 1956. The list of world premieres runs as far as 2007, when a ballet titled The Ring was given its first performances.

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• 5. The Ballet School Pipeline

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  Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky and George Balanchine all emerged from the same school attached to the Mariinsky. So did Mathilde Kschessinskaya, Olga Preobrajenskaya and Tamara Karsavina. They were students of the Imperial Ballet School and its style.

  A second wave of artists trained under, and after, the teaching of Agrippina Vaganova. Marina Semyonova and Galina Ulanova belonged to it. So did Rudolf Nureyev, Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Irina Kolpakova, Galina Mezentseva and Altynai Asylmuratova are in that group too.

  More recent dancers of renown include Ulyana Lopatkina, Diana Vishneva and Svetlana Zakharova. They studied at the school as it is now named. It carries its great teacher's name as the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet.

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• 6. Batons And Directors

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  Yuri Temirkanov served as Principal Conductor from 1976 to 1988. Under him the opera company kept staging innovative productions of both modern and classic Russian operas.

  Earlier names appear in the theatre's record too. Mikhail Zhukov held a conductor's post from 1932 to 1935, and Israel Chudnovsky is listed beside him. Alexander Skibnevsky served as a theatre director in 1946 and 1947.

  Since Temirkanov's retirement in 1988, the conductor Valery Gergiev has been the theatre's general director. Today the house is home to the Mariinsky Ballet, the Mariinsky Opera and the Mariinsky Orchestra.

  In April 2022, the resident conductor Gavriel Heine resigned. He was a protégé of Gergiev, and he left in part because of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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• 7. A Second Stage

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  In spring 2007 the nearby Mariinsky Theatre Concert Hall opened. The French architect Xavier Fabre designed it.

  A larger project began in 2003, when construction started on a new building then known as the Second Stage. The first design came from the French architect Jean Nouvel. That plan was halted at the sub-basement level.

  A new team took over in 2009. The Canadian firm Diamond and Schmitt Architects worked with the local partner KB ViPS Architects. Their building, called Mariinsky II, has 1,830 seats. Construction finished in May 2013, at a price of 500 million euros.

  The project was expected to give Saint Petersburg its equivalent of New York City's Lincoln Center.

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• 8. Beyond The Building

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  Vladivostok received a regional stage of the Mariinsky Theatre in 2016. Vladikavkaz followed in 2017. These branches extend the theatre's reach across Russia.

  In 2009 the Mariinsky launched its own record label. The team that runs the LSO Live label in London manages it.

  Valery Gergiev conducts many of the releases. They include Shostakovich's opera The Nose and Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex paired with Les Noces. Denis Matsuev plays Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No 3 on another title. One recording gathers Tchaikovsky's 1812, the Moscow Cantata and Marche Slave.

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