Hermitage Theatre

The Hermitage Theatre stands at 32 Palace Embankment, on the corner with the Winter Canal, and is part of the enfilade of buildings linked by passages to the Winter Palace, together forming the single museum complex of the State Hermitage. It is a court theatre of the Classicist era: under Catherine II it staged operas, ballets and dramas, and today it hosts chamber concerts.

Catherine II signed the decree for the construction of a stone theatre "at the Hermitage" in September 1783, entrusting the work to the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi. Older buildings had previously stood on the site, including an early Winter Palace and a wooden theatre within the Small Hermitage for a select circle of courtiers — hence the name given to the new theatre. The work proceeded in stages: the interior spaces were fitted out first, followed by the construction of the block with its façade onto the Neva. The theatre opened on 16 November 1785 with an opera set to music by Mikhail Sokolovsky, although the finishing work continued for several more years, and the façade with its balustrade and statues only took its final form by 1802.

Quarenghi, a follower of the Palladian school of architecture, drew on the image of the ancient Greek theatron and on the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, built to Andrea Palladio's designs; some solutions were also suggested to the architect by the excavations at Pompeii. The auditorium is semicircular, about 19 metres in diameter, and holds around a hundred spectators seated amphitheatre-style in six rows, with no division into class-based boxes. The Corinthian-order columns are faced with artificial marble, and niches hold statues of Apollo and the Muses. The building's rounded corner is linked to the Small Hermitage by an arch over the Winter Canal, built by Yuri Felten in 1783, reminiscent of Venice's Bridge of Sighs.

The empress herself wrote plays for this stage, while the staging of productions was handled by the artist Pietro Gonzaga, invited to the capital, who repeated here a device he had already tried at Milan's La Scala — a curtain depicting a view of the theatre building itself from the outside. From 1808 New Year masquerades were held here with a "crystal tent" set up in the middle of the hall, and in 1823 the space was briefly given over to the training of guards regiment soldiers. Well-known dramatic actors of the late 18th century performed on its stage, and later Fyodor Chaliapin sang there. At the end of the 19th century the wooden roof trusses were replaced with metal ones, and in the early 20th century the architect Leontiy Benois redesigned the foyer to accommodate a French tapestry presented to the court.

After the revolution, the building housed a workers' university; regular performances ceased by the mid-1930s, and for a long time the theatre served as a Hermitage lecture hall. A large-scale restoration at the end of the 20th century restored the stage to its former appearance — it reopened in January 1991, and a year later the ground floor was given over to an exhibition devoted to the oldest of St Petersburg's palaces, which had once stood on this very site.

Today the Hermitage Theatre is a working stage under the museum's management, hosting ballet and opera performances as well as classical music concerts. A rare Russian example of an 18th-century court theatre building, it remains a living continuation of the tradition established by Quarenghi more than two centuries ago.