Musa Jalil Opera and Ballet Theatre

The Musa Jalil Opera and Ballet Theatre on Liberty Square is the city's grand 19th-century opera house, a long white columned building with a portico and a sculpture of the Tatar poet Musa Jalil outside. The repertory covers the standard Russian and Western opera and ballet canon plus several Tatar works.

Tickets are inexpensive by international standards. Two annual festivals — the Chaliapin Opera Festival in February and the Nuriyev Ballet Festival in May — attract major Russian performers and a more international audience. Worth checking what is on for any evening you have in the city.

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A story
Musa Jalil, the Tatar poet who gives the theatre its name, was captured by the Germans on the Volkhov Front in 1942 and joined what he thought was a resistance cell among Tatar prisoners of war. The cell was infiltrated and Jalil was executed by guillotine in Berlin in 1944. The poems he wrote in his Moabit prison notebook were smuggled out by a fellow prisoner and only published in the 1950s, winning him a posthumous Lenin Prize and lasting status as the great Tatar poet of the 20th century.

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