State Opera Burgas

The curtain first rose on opera in Burgas on 25 June 1955, with Verdi's La traviata; the company was amateur then, and it staged thirty-six operas, operettas and ballets before the state took it over in 1972 under its first director, Lilyana Zhablenski. The ballet had gone its own way earlier, with Hertel's The Rivals in 1958, and a mixed chorus was formed in 1972 alongside the new status. Today the house works with the Burgas philharmonic as a single opera and philharmonic society, playing the Italian repertory it built its reputation on, ballet, operetta and a summer season by the sea. Nayden Todorov was its artistic director from 2003 to 2005.