Key figures: Catherine II (Catherine the Great), Prince Pyotr Urusov, Michael Maddox
Summary
The Bolshoi Theatre of Moscow traces its founding to March 28, 1776, when Empress Catherine II granted Prince Pyotr Vasilyevich Urusov a ten-year privilege — an exclusive licence — to organize theatrical performances, masquerades, balls, and other public entertainments in Moscow. The date of that imperial charter is conventionally taken as the birth of the theatre company.
Urusov, a provincial procurator and nobleman, undertook to build a permanent stone theatre for the city as a condition of the privilege. Finding the venture financially burdensome, he brought in a partner: Michael Maddox (Russified as Medox), an English impresario, engineer, and former tightrope performer who had settled in Moscow. In its earliest years the company performed in a private residence, staging drama, opera, and ballet for Moscow audiences. In 1777 the partners acquired a site on Petrovka Street, and on December 30, 1780, they opened a purpose-built playhouse there — the Petrovsky (Petrovka) Theatre — which established the resident company that would evolve into the Bolshoi.
The Russian word bolshoy means “big” or “grand,” and the name came into use to distinguish the large opera-and-ballet house from smaller Moscow theatres. The present, much larger building — designed by Joseph Bové after fire destroyed earlier structures — opened in 1825 as the Bolshoi Petrovsky Theatre, and the institution was formally styled the State Academic Bolshoi Theatre in the twentieth century.
Significance
The 1776 charter marks the origin of one of the world’s oldest and most celebrated performing-arts institutions, and of a continuous Russian tradition of state-sponsored opera and ballet in Moscow. The Bolshoi grew into a leading venue for Russian musical theatre, later premiering major works and cultivating a ballet company of global renown. Within the year 1776 the founding stands as a notable non-Western cultural milestone, a reminder that the year’s significance extended well beyond the American Revolution to the courts and cities of Enlightenment Europe, where monarchs such as Catherine the Great patronized the arts as instruments of prestige and civic display.