Mikhailovsky Theatre

This guide to the Mikhailovsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg centers on a January night in 1934, when a young composer barely in his late twenties, Dmitri Shostakovich, saw his opera about adultery and murder premiere on this stage under conductor Samuil Samosud. You'll hear how the production, staged here when the house was still called the Maly Opera Theatre, filled the hall night after night and toured as far as Copenhagen and New York within two years. Look up at the silver, velvet and crystal of the hall, opened in 1833 and seating just over eleven hundred people, as you listen.