History

Lviv — known as Lwów in Polish and Lemberg in German — had been the capital of Galicia under Austro-Hungarian administration since 1773. By the late nineteenth century it was a city of some 150,000 people, with a university, polytechnic, multiple newspapers, and an active cultural life conducted in Polish, Ukrainian, and German. The need to replace the aging municipal theatre on the same site had been apparent for decades, and in 1895 the city administration finally opened the commission.

Zygmunt Gorgolewski — a Lwów-educated architect who had spent years working in Vienna and Dresden — won the competition with a design that combined the Neo-Renaissance plan logic of the great nineteenth-century opera houses (Vienna, Paris, Dresden) with the ornamental elaboration that the emerging Art Nouveau movement was bringing to surface decoration. Construction began in 1897 and the building opened in 1900 to considerable celebration, the timing coinciding with a moment of peak Galician confidence in Austro-Hungarian cultural life.

The twentieth century treated the theatre roughly: the building was occupied and used by successive administrations — Austrian, Polish, Soviet, and German — through two world wars and Soviet collectivisation. But it survived, and after Ukrainian independence in 1991 became a cultural symbol of the city’s Polish-Ukrainian heritage. In 1999, during the theatre’s centenary, it was renamed after Solomiya Krushelnytska — the soprano who had trained in Lviv before becoming internationally famous, and who had returned to the city in her old age.