Lviv Opera

Whichever way you cut through central Lviv, Prospekt Svobody eventually delivers you to the same sight: the Opera's florid facade closing the far end of the avenue, three winged bronze figures thrown against the sky above it. This is the city's architectural showpiece and one of the grandest theatres in Europe.

Its full name is the Solomiya Krushelnytska Lviv National Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet, after the celebrated Ukrainian soprano. Everyone just calls it the Opera — landmark, meeting point and a building people come to see for its own sake as much as for anything staged inside it.

A theatre built over a river

The building began with an ambitious competition in 1895 that drew leading architects of the day, among them the Viennese firm of Fellner & Helmer. Meeting in Leipzig, the jury chose the design of Zygmunt Gorgolewski outright. Ground was broken in June 1897, and on 4 October 1900 the theatre opened with the premiere of Janek, a lyric drama by Władysław Żeleński.

The most remarkable thing about the place is what it stands on. Gorgolewski raised his theatre directly over the River Poltva, buried by then in an underground culvert. To stop the heavy building sinking into the soft, wet ground, he laid a foundation that was innovative for its time — a solution that set local engineers arguing and gave rise to one of Lviv's most enduring legends, the theatre that floats on water. Their worry wasn't unreasonable, but the gamble held: the Order of the Iron Crown followed in 1901.

Neo-Renaissance, Viennese swagger

The style is Viennese neo-Renaissance, laced with neo-Baroque, eclecticism and a first breath of Art Nouveau. Sculpture crowds the facade: allegories of Comedy and Tragedy, figures personifying Music, and a crowning composition over the whole.

The signatures are the three winged bronzes above the main pediment. At the centre stands Glory, holding out a gilded palm branch, with the geniuses of Drama and Music to either side. These ‘Glories’, by the sculptor Petro Viytovych, became the theatre's calling card and one of the most recognisable shapes on the Lviv skyline.

Inside: mirrors, marble and the Muses

If the exterior is lavish, the interior outdoes it — gilding, coloured marble, moulded stucco and painted panels wherever the eye lands. The four-tier auditorium is shaped like a lyre and seats more than a thousand.

Two features stand out. The Mirror Hall in the foyer sets great mirrors against allegorical canvases devoted to the seasons. And the great prize of the stage is the Parnassus curtain by Henryk Siemiradzki — Mount Parnassus with Apollo, the Pythia, Themis and the nine Muses, four years in the painting. It is lowered only on special occasions, so catching sight of it is a small stroke of luck.

Legends and lore

The darkest legend attaches to the architect himself. The story goes that when the building began to settle on the damp ground above the hidden Poltva, Gorgolewski was broken by the strain and died soon after. Historians complicate that neat version, but the image of the artist who paid with his life for his ‘folly’ long ago passed into city folklore.

And the detail that stops every visitor: the Poltva still runs beneath the theatre, unseen, sealed in its culvert. Standing in the gilded foyer, it's hard to credit that the bed of a river lies directly under your feet.

Practical information

The theatre stands at the heart of the city, at Prospekt Svobody 28, an easy walk from Ploshcha Rynok and most of the tourist trail. It is a working house — dozens of opera soloists, a ballet company and a full orchestra — with a repertoire of more than twenty operas and around twenty ballets, sung in the original language with Ukrainian surtitles.

There are two ways to see it. The best is to buy a ticket and give yourself over to a whole evening at the opera. The other is a daytime guided tour through the halls and foyers, with the story of the building told as you go. The Opera looks its most theatrical after dark, when the facade is lit and the bronze Glories seem almost to stir against the night sky.

The heart of cultural Lviv

The Opera has been the centre of gravity of the city's cultural life for more than a century. Its facade is reproduced on the postcards, magnets and photographs of millions of travellers, and its silhouette — those three winged figures — has become an unofficial emblem of Lviv, second only to the Town Hall tower.

For anyone arriving for the first time, it is an unmissable stop. Even if you can't make a performance, it's worth standing a while in front of the facade, lifting your eyes to the Glories, and picturing the sheer nerve it took, more than a hundred years ago, to build a palace of a theatre directly over a river.