Odesa Opera House reopens its doors, defying tactics by Putin

ODESA, UKRAINE » In a nation at war, and a city aching for some semblance of normality, the Odesa Opera reopened for the first time since the Russian invasion began, asserting civilization against the barbarism unleashed from Moscow.

The performance Friday in the magnificent Opera Theater, opened in 1810 on the plateau above the now shuttered Black Sea port, began with an impassioned rendering of the Ukrainian national anthem. Images of wheat swaying in the wind formed the backdrop, a reminder of the grain from its fertile hinterland that long made Odesa rich but now sits in silos as war rages and global food shortages grow.

“In case of sirens, proceed to the shelter within the theater,” said Ilona Trach, the theater official who presented the program. “You are the soul of this opera house, and we think it's very important to demonstrate after 115 days of silence that we are able to perform.”

Odesa has been generally quiet in the past few weeks, but just 70 miles to the east — in the port city of Mykolaiv, where President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine paid a visit Saturday — Russian shelling forms a daily onslaught. That Russian President Vladimir Putin covets Odesa — as a port critical to Ukraine's economy, as a city long part of the Russian and then Soviet empires and as a cultural symbol — is no secret.

If the cobble-stoned, tree-lined boulevards of the city suggest calm, it is a fragile quiet that could be broken at any time. But then Odesa — its history a procession of triumph and trauma as borders shifted, the Holocaust enveloped it and cycles of boom and bust followed one another — has always lived for the moment.

The theater — a rococo palace of gold braid, red Lyonnais velvet, chandeliers and mirrors — was about onethird full as a result of security restrictions. Viacheslav Chernukho-Volich, the Opera's chief conductor, led a performance that included a duet from “Romeo and Juliet,” and arias from “Tosca,” “Turandot” and from Odesa-born composer Kostiantyn Dankevych.

The music seemed a defiant miracle of culture and beauty, the ultimate rebuke to the Russian savagery at Bucha and Mariupol, places that have become synonyms of the gratuitous destruction unleashed by Putin in a war reflecting his obsession that Ukraine is a fictive nation.

“We got permission to perform from the military 10 days ago, and today is pure happiness,” ChernukhoVolich said. “At the start of the war the explosions and sirens terrified me, as if I had plunged into some unreality, a World War II movie, but humans get used to everything. It is difficult, yet we want to believe in the victory of civilization.”

Chernukho-Volich worked in Moscow for several years, but in 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea and instigated a separatist war in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, he said he had an epiphany: the imperial idea was inseparable from Russia, and any politician, like Putin, prepared to unleash its elixir would at once thrive at home and threaten the world. He left.

Now he performs in an opera house first designed by a St. Petersburg, Russia, architect and rebuilt after a fire by Viennese architects, with its facade adorned with a bust of Alexander Pushkin; and he lives in a city founded by a Russian empress and substantially laid out by a French duke, home over the years to traders of every faith and creed, drawn from the Mediterranean and from across the steppes of Central Asia.