Odesa Opera and Ballet Theater

Odesa's opera house is the showpiece of a city that always looked west for its models. The first theatre here opened in 1810, designed by Francesco Frapolli and reworked by the French architect Thomas de Thomon, and it served the growing port for six decades until it burned out on a January night in 1873. For its replacement the city turned to the Viennese partnership of Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer, the busiest theatre builders of the late Habsburg world. The foundation stone was laid in 1884, and the new house opened in October 1887, having cost 1.3 million roubles.

The building is neo-baroque at its most confident. Its front carries busts of Pushkin, Glinka, Gogol and Griboyedov set in niches, and the roofline is animated with sculpture: Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, rides a chariot drawn by four panthers - an allegory of art taming savagery - while groups of Orpheus and Terpsichore crown the portico. Everything about the exterior is meant to announce culture at the scale of a capital, in a provincial port that wanted to be seen as one.

Inside is a horseshoe auditorium of about 1,600 seats in late French Rococo, a froth of gilded ornament around the tiers of boxes. The ceiling is divided into medallions painted with scenes from Shakespeare - Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Winter's Tale and Twelfth Night - originally by Franz Leffler and repainted after a fire in 1925 destroyed the stage and the original curtain. The hall is famous for its acoustics, said to carry even a whisper from the stage to the farthest seat. The house was also technically advanced for its day: it was the first building in Odesa lit by electricity, it was given twenty-four exits so that a fire like the one that destroyed its predecessor could not turn into a disaster, and in summer ice was lowered into the basement to cool the air drawn into the hall.

The ground has always been the problem. Parts of the foundations began to settle almost as soon as the theatre opened, and the building has been shored up repeatedly, most recently in a restoration completed in 2007. Chaliapin sang here, and the company remains one of the principal opera and ballet houses of Ukraine.

Getting there

The theatre stands in the centre of Odesa, the Black Sea port city, in the old centre of the city. Odesa International Airport (ODS) lies about 7 km southwest of the city centre.