History

The site on Theatre Square has housed a publicly accessible theatre since 1780, when the English entrepreneur Michael Maddox and Prince Pyotr Urusov obtained an imperial licence to operate a company. The building burned multiple times before 1825, when Osip Bove rebuilt the theatre as part of Moscow’s post-Napoleonic reconstruction. Bove’s Imperial Petrovsky Theatre — as it was then known — burned catastrophically in 1853. The commission to rebuild went to Albert Kavos, who chose to enlarge Bove’s plan, retain the colonnaded portico but give it more massive proportions, and add the bronze Apollo quadriga by the sculptor Peter Klodt.

The building inaugurated in 1856 was timed for the coronation of Alexander II, and the ceremony of its opening established its status as a state institution. For the next sixty years, the Bolshoi was the pre-eminent venue for opera and ballet in Russia: Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake had its disastrous first performance here in 1877 (it was not well received); subsequent productions restored both the work and the theatre’s prestige. The company attracted the finest singers, conductors, and choreographers. Chaliapin and Sobinov defined the operatic style; Geltzer and Tikhomirov defined the balletic one.

The Soviet period institutionalised the Bolshoi as the flagship of Soviet culture. During the Cold War, Bolshoi Ballet tours to Western capitals became instruments of cultural diplomacy, and the standard of the company’s corps de ballet in the 1950s and 1960s was widely regarded as the highest in the world. The building itself was in decline by the late 20th century, the stage machinery obsolete and the auditorium structure weakened. The restoration of 2005–2011, costing over half a billion dollars, was the largest cultural heritage project in Russian history.