Kuibyshev Square and the Opera and Ballet Theatre

In the autumn of nineteen forty-one, the Samara opera company lost this building. The Palace of Culture on Kuibyshev Square had been built for it only three years earlier, but it was now given to the Bolshoi Theatre, evacuated from Moscow. The Samara artists dispersed among houses of culture and military units, while Moscow operas and ballets appeared on their stage.

Composer Dmitri Shostakovich was evacuated to Kuibyshev with his family. In besieged Leningrad, he had managed to write three movements of Symphony No. 7; here he was to complete the finale. At first, the Shostakoviches lived in a school classroom with nearly twenty Bolshoi Theatre artists. The family was given a place by the window, and the composer's son fell ill. Later they were given a two-room apartment near the square, and there Shostakovich completed the score.

The first performance took place before the symphony appeared on this stage. Shostakovich and pianist Lev Oborin played the symphony four hands on a rented piano in the room of one of the female orchestral musicians. Bolshoi Theatre conductor Samuil Samosud lived on the floor below. He came upstairs at the sound of the music and stood silently in the doorway. Then Samosud set about preparing the orchestral premiere.

A full score alone was not enough for this: each musician needed a separate part. Kuibyshev had neither music paper nor enough copyists. The paper was sent from Moscow on a special plane, and the Bolshoi Theatre artists copied out their own parts themselves. The snare drum lacked a wire stretched beneath the drumhead. An instrument technician replaced it with a coil from an electric hot plate.

On March fifth, nineteen forty-two, the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra, conducted by Samosud, played Symphony No. 7 before an audience in this building for the first time. All-Union Radio broadcast the concert. Shostakovich sat in the front rows; when the hall rose, he tried to stop the applause with awkward hand gestures, but he was taken onto the stage anyway. The composer gave the musicians programs with messages of gratitude for their shared work.

The very next day, photographic negatives of the manuscript were sent to Great Britain and the United States. In March, the symphony was performed in Moscow; in June, in London; in July, in New York; and on August ninth, in besieged Leningrad. For Samosud and the evacuated orchestra, the Kuibyshev concert became the beginning of the global history of the work they had prepared using paper sent by plane and with a component from an electric hot plate in the drum.

The cover of that first program printed the name of the Bolshoi Theatre and that of Samuil Samosud in large type. The address appeared below in small print: “Kuibyshev Palace of Culture. City of Kuibyshev.”

Both inscriptions referred to Valerian Kuibyshev, the Bolshevik leader who in nineteen seventeen headed the revolutionary committee created by the Samara Soviets, and then the Samara Governorate Executive Committee. Later he became chairman of Gosplan. Two days after his death in January nineteen thirty-five, Samara was named Kuibyshev; that same year, the square received his name. The city regained the name Samara in nineteen ninety-one, while the square retained Kuibyshev's name and the monument erected in front of the theatre.

Since March two thousand twenty-two, the theatre itself has officially borne the name of Dmitri Shostakovich—specifically because of the first performance of Symphony No. 7 in this building. Kuibyshev remains on the square, Shostakovich has appeared on the theatre façade, and in the museum's program from the world premiere, their names still stand on the same page.