Bolshoj Theatre

Imperial licence in hand, Prince Pyotr Urusov began giving performances in Moscow in 1776, and from that year the Bolshoi dates its history. Fire took its theatres more than once; the neoclassical building on Theatre Square that stands today, with Apollo's quadriga above the portico, was raised by Alberto Cavos and opened in 1856, the year of Alexander II's coronation. Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" had its first performance in the house in 1877. Between 2005 and 2011 the theatre closed for a comprehensive reconstruction, which restored the nineteenth-century auditorium and rebuilt everything behind and beneath it; the opera and ballet companies remain among the largest in the world.