The Bolshoi was co-founded by an English tightrope walker
Russia's grandest opera house began in 1776 when Catherine II licensed a prince to stage entertainments, and he teamed up with Michael Maddox, an English tightrope walker. Two of its early theatres burned down. Today its neoclassical façade decorates the 100-ruble note and its ballet company, with more than 200 dancers, is the world's biggest.
Prince Peter Urusov and Maddox first put on shows in a private house before acquiring the Petrovka Theatre, which began presenting plays and operas at the end of 1780. Fire destroyed it in 1805; its replacement, the New Arbat Imperial Theatre, was lost in the blaze that accompanied the French invasion of Moscow in 1812. The present building, designed by Joseph Bové from a competition entry by Andrei Mikhailov judged too expensive, opened in January 1825 as the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theatre with a ballet by the Catalan composer Fernando Sor.
It kept burning and being rebuilt. After a fire in 1853, Alberto Cavos, son of the opera composer Catterino Cavos, led the reconstruction, and a wartime bomb later damaged the structure. Premieres staged there include Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake on 4 March 1877 and Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in 1935. Under the Bolsheviks it was renamed the State Academic Bolshoi Theatre in 1919 and, days later, narrowly survived an attempt to close it.
After Stalin's death in 1953 the ballet toured abroad, earning prestige and hard currency and making the Bolshoi name famous in the West. It also lost stars: Alexander Godunov defected in August 1979, and others followed within weeks and in later years. Until the mid-1990s most foreign operas were sung there in Russian.
From 2005 to 2011 the theatre closed for a restoration that engineers found urgent, with over 75% of the structure unstable. The work recovered acoustics lost in the Soviet era and the imperial decor, and it reopened on 28 October 2011 with 1,740 seats. The official bill was 21 billion rubles, but other estimates ran as high as $1.1 billion, and prosecutors alleged in 2009 that the lead contractor had been paid three times for the same work.
Source: Bolshoi Theatre
