The Odessa Opera and Ballet House, which is among the Ukraine’s greatest architectural monuments, is one of the most beautiful theatres in the world.
The city’s first theatre was built in 1809, only fifteen years after Odessa was founded. This building was burnt down in 1873, the victim of a gas burner that flared up. The city authorities announced a worldwide competition to find a design for a new opera house that would be worthy of a port whose key position on the Black Sea had made it a major trading link between Russia and the rest of the world.
The selection process lasted years, the eventual winners being the Austrian architects F Fellner and H Helmer, who modelled the new building on Vienna Opera House. Three local architects supervised the building work and in 1887, three years after starting it, the theatre was opened, at a cost of 1,300,000 roubles. Fellner turned up for the opening ceremony, where he shouted enthusiastically: “This is the finest theatre in the world!” The first performance was extracts from Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov and Griboyedov’s comedy Woe From Wit.
The theatre has an Italian baroque façade, with a Renaissance–style entrance and stone figures depicting scenes from Aristophanes and Euripides. There are also allegorical stone sculptures of the Goddess of Tragedy, in a chariot drawn by four panthers; Orpheus, charming the centaur with his music; cherubs playing, singing and dancing teaching a young girl; there are busts of Pushkin, Gogol, Griboyedov and Glinka, representing poetry, comedy, drama and music.
The auditorium is in the style of Louis XVI, with a chandelier that weighs almost two and a half tons, surrounded on the ceiling by frescoes depicting scenes from Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Winter’s Tale and As You Like It. The architects, remembering a fire in a Viennese theatre, provided the foyer with twenty- four exits.
There was another fire in 1926, but the theatre was restored and re-opened by the Soviet authorities. It was again renovated in 1967, using ten kilograms of gold and modernising the stage equipment.
The theatre has played a crucial role in the development of Russian and Ukranian music; artists who have worked there include Pavolva, Isadora Duncan, Titta Ruffa, Tchaikovsky, Shalyapin and Caruso. There are now thirty productions in its repertoire and the company has toured throughout Europe, Asia and the USA. This is its third visit to this country following the critically acclaimed tour of Barber of Seville and Traviata in summer 2002 and Madama Butterfly & Rigoletto in autumn 2003.
FOOTNOTE: Odessa has a unique and indelible place in the history of cinema. In 1905, the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied and encouraged the population of Odessa in rioting and looting that lasted a week. Twenty years later, the film director Sergei Eisenstein made Battleship Potemkin, a partly fictional account of the mutiny. The most famous scene was filmed on the Monumental Steps, now known as the Potemkin Steps, in Odessa. Innocent civilians are shown being mown down in the bloodshed; and by cross-cutting, the happenings of a minute are expanded to the last five minutes. The film critic John Russell Taylor wrote: “The image of a woman with her spectacles smashed in her eye has turned up so often in painting and print-making that she must by now have entered the collective unconscious”. Battleship Potemkin was judged best film ever made by a panel of international judges in 1948 and 1958.
