The first act of "La Traviata" gets underway underground.
It’s not obvious from the cellar’s appearance what a godsend it actually is: gray, concrete walls, dusty cement. Instead of an orchestra pit, there is just a yellow line on the floor. The stage is just six by eight meters and there is no curtain. No mystery. For the first act, the set includes a table, a couple of chairs and an standing mirror.
This is where the Kharkiv State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre Mykola Lysenko, one of the best opera houses in Ukraine, is presenting Giuseppe Verdi’s "La Traviata” on this Sunday afternoon. The 400 chairs for the audience are almost all occupied by middle-aged married couples, younger lovers holding hands and whispering groups of women.
[M] Scherl / SZ Photo, C. Schlegelmilch / akg-images, Sergey Ryumin / Getty Images
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 19/2025 (May 3rd, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.
The prelude begins, softly plaintive strings in four-four time. The music from the orchestra is overlaid by a humming noise, either the ventilation system or the generator in the corner. But at least down here you can’t hear the explosions in the city up above, and the conductors also don’t interrupt the performances when the air-raid sirens go off.
"La Traviata,” the tragic story of the courtesan Violetta, begins with a lavish ball. Leading lady Yulia Antonova appears in a white corset gown, the men are in tails and the women of the choir swish their wide skirts. Soon, all of them are raising champagne glasses and singing the famous brindisi. "Let’s drink from the joyful glasses where beauty is blossoming! Let the fleeting hour yield to our intoxication!”
The audience gathered in the basement for a production of "La Traviata."
Publikum im Keller: Paare halten sich an den Händen, Frauengrüppchen flüstern
Kharkiv's postmodern opera house is known among locals as "the aircraft carrier."
Down here, the piece, staged so often, is once again deeply moving. Every performance in this cellar is a tour de force. And a minor victory for Ukraine over Russia.
In the three years since Russian strongman Vladimir Putin launched his full invasion of Ukraine, the opera house in Kharkiv has withstood quite a lot: Not only has the building been fired on, but the theater has also lost almost a third of its employees. Many fled, some were drafted into the military, and one died at the front. The battered opera house has – for now – found its salvation in the basement.
As have so many other institutions in Kharkiv, the city below ground. Schools hold lessons in cellars and subway stations while city administrators, the university and the art museum have mostly moved below street level.
Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine and an important hub of science and culture, is located dangerously close to the front. More than a million people live here 30 kilometers from the Russian border. Rockets fired by the Kremlin from Russian soil can reach the city in 30 seconds.
Last year, Russia attacked Kharkiv 318 times with almost 20 different kinds of rockets and drones, killing 98 people and injuring over 1,000. There might have been even more victims had Kharkiv – the indestructible city – not gone into hiding.
The opera house above the cellar is essentially a gigantic target. Its overhanging roof is larger than a football field at a height of 10 stories. The locals refer to the theater as the "aircraft carrier.” Up on top of the building, it becomes clear why it is so dangerous inside.
"Here, up ahead,” says Igor Tulusov, the general director of the theater and the man responsible for the hundreds of people who are once again working in the building below after an almost two-year break. Tulusov walks quickly across the roof between small, rounded windows made of acrylic glass. It is a lovely view, with the golden onion domes of the Church of the Holy Myrrh Bearers sparkling in the spring sun.
General Director Tulusov on the roof next to the unexploded Russian rocket.
Igor Tulusov, the general director of the Kharkiv State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre Mykola Lysenko
The director points down at the roof we are walking across. Round patches can be seen stuck to the light-gray roof covering. Three years ago, during the first weeks of the war, shrapnel struck the roof and it caught on fire. On the other side of the roof lies a Russian artillery rocket that never exploded.
The impacts and the shock waves from that early attack shattered 2,000 square meters of windows. They have since been replaced, says Tulusov. Because of the moisture, it is crucial to not merely board up the broken windows with plywood. "It’s also psychologically important for us,” says Tulusov.
Warm and welcoming, Tulusov, 67, is in shirtsleeves with a full beard and glasses. He studied theoretical physics and once led the Association of Aerospace Companies. Later, he became a consultant and crisis manager. That was his role, he says, when he was pulled into the theater 11 years ago.
He was in the building when the roof was struck. "I moved here with my cat in the first year of the war,” he says. His wife, he says, fled to Austria where their grandchildren live. He slept on a sofa in a room across from his office, keeping watch on the opera house with a couple of staffers, says Tulusov. The fire department had more than it could handle in the first months of the war.
It was a period when Kharkiv frequently came under attack and people slept in the subway stations. Thousands of buildings were destroyed. Every day, trains brought more and more people out of the city. Hundreds of thousands of residents fled during that period.
Since then, says Tulusov, he has known every corner of the building. The theater has floor space of 52,000 square meters. Hundreds of rooms, narrow hallways with worn parquet flooring and a large auditorium with 1,500 seats are packed in under the vast roof, along with a café, a pizzeria and even a sauna.
The great hall can seat 1,500 people, but is currently unused.
The grand foyer is one of the spaces that can no longer be used.
An evening outside the Kharkiv opera house.
This post-modernist monster was designed in the 1960s as a cultural and entertainment center, but it was only completed in 1991, says Tulusov, one month before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The stone slabs from Armenia, which have grown porous, are falling from the façade, but otherwise the building is "fully functional.”
That, though, is of little help to Tulusov. He isn’t allowed to use the majority of the structure, with city authorities having shut down almost all above-ground event spaces. The imposing foyer on the upper floor has acquired a layer of dust, the choir rehearsal room and the ballet hall are empty. The director realized that the opera also needed a new home, which is why he decided to set up the cellar as a concert hall. Until then, it had been used for storage of backdrops and construction materials.
Tulusov managed to collect all the necessary permits and for the past year, the opera has once again been able to sell tickets. There is no parquet flooring, no first and second tiers, no red carpet and no bar serving caviar and sparkling wine. But there are 400 black chairs, and they are usually sold out.
The fact that this theater has survived, says Tulusov, is thanks to its status as a national theater, which secures its wages. And thanks to the cellar.
It’s two days before the "Traviata” performance and the orchestra and singers are holding a rehearsal without costumes and props. They sing the drinking song and clink their imaginary champagne glasses together.
Verdi’s heroine Violetta – the 36-year-old soprano and crowd favorite Yulia Antonova – is wearing a leopard-print sweatshirt. She sings the love aria from the first act like it’s the premier on the big stage. Nobody in the room moves a muscle until the last notes fade away.
Opera diva Yulia Antonova sitting backstage.
Antonova has been part of the ensemble since 2016 and has played Violetta a number of times – up above in front of an opulently decorated set, and down here with nothing.
The singer has taken a seat in one of the rows of chairs for the audience, sipping ginger tea from an insulated mug. She has nothing bad to say about the cellar. Sure, the stage is a bit small and you have to measure your steps so you don’t fall into the orchestra. And she can still feel the dust in her throat. "But you should have seen what it looked like before,” says Antonova. The acoustics were like in a bathroom before everything was cleared out, she says, adding that a lot of work and effort went into it.
Antonova is married to a fireman who is not allowed to leave the city. When Russia strikes yet another residential building, he pulls the dead and the body parts out of the rubble. "I once asked him how he can stand it,” she says. "He said: In the moment I reach in, I don’t really realize that it is a human being.”
Antonova remained in the city with her children during the first months of the war. Her daughter was two months old at the time and her son had just started school. "We slept on a mattress in the parking garage below our building,” she recalls. "It was cold, but the worst thing were the fighter bombers flying over the city. The dreadful anticipation was the most terrible feeling.”
Antonova was helped by the fact that she was soon able to resume performing. City leaders quickly realized that people needed more than just food and a place underground to sleep. The police started to drive the opera singer and the musicians left in the city from one subway station to the next to cheer up the scared populace. The singers, violinists and viola players would stand on the stairs leading down to the tracks.
Never in her life, says Antonova, had she felt so useful. "When we sang, the people could briefly forget about the war.”
The rehearsal comes to an end and behind the stage, the director shows a young singer how to move on the stage. This production of "Traviata” has been part of the theater’s repertoire for years and they chose to perform it in the cellar because they could fill almost all of the main roles with the soloists they still had. Even still, though, they have had to work in a couple of newcomers.
Before the Russian invasion, the theater employed around 800 people. There was an opera ensemble, the orchestra, the chorus, the ballet, the makeup artists, seamstresses, the costume shop, the props, shoemakers, stage designers, lighting, gate and wardrobe. Tulusov says that his staff is now back up to 600. They have been able to fill the ranks with fresh graduates from the conservatory and have also taken on some musicians from the philharmonic.
The costume department is large, befitting a significant opera house like the one in Kharkiv.
The costume storage room is full.
The director has mainly lost male soloists, some of his best singers and dancers. Ukraine drafts men between the ages of 25 and 60 for military service and nobody in this age group is allowed to leave the country without special permission. And that also applies to artists. Ten theater employees are currently serving in the army. The artistic welder Sergiy Puvovarov, who volunteered for service at the beginning of hostilities, was killed at the front near Izyum. "He had golden hands,” says Tulusov.
The war has made the director into an arbiter of life and death. The theater has been classified by Ukrainian officials as a strategically important operation. "That’s why I’m allowed to reserve 50 percent of employees who are eligible for conscription.” It sounds as though Tulusov says "reserve” so that he doesn’t have to say what he is actually doing. Saving the lives of those he holds onto.
Mainly, says Tulusov, he has reserved the "creative people” and a few technicians without whom the theater couldn’t function. "It is morally difficult,” he says. "The guys are part of the family.”
It wasn’t always clear that this theater family would be able to stay together at all. At the Culture Ministry in Kyiv, someone apparently came up with the idea in the early days of the war to break up the theater company and distribute the artists among other national opera houses in Kyiv, Odessa and Lviv. Not only would they be safer there, was the apparent belief, but gaps in the ranks at those opera houses could be filled. Tulusov refused. "No, the theater belongs to Kharkiv,” he said – at least according to the account provided by the opera house’s chief stage director Armen Kaloyan.
Koloyan, 54, is a charming man who enjoys turning an interview into a soliloquy. His head is shaved, he wears a silver earring, and, on this day, he has on strikingly large basketball shoes. Like Tulusov and most of the others, Koloyan is from Kharkiv. Leaving the city or giving up on the theater is completely out of the question for him, now more than ever. "We have been the vanguard of Ukrainian culture in the east ever since Russia occupied Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014,” he says.
Chief Stage Director Armen Kaloyan hopes for great things for his opera house once the war comes to an end.
Armen Kaloyan, chief stage director
The chief stage director spent many years on stage as an actor himself. In his windowless office, historic swords and daggers hang on the walls. These days, Koloyan mostly stages operas and ballets. He isn’t just interested in the survival of the theater, he wants it to remain one of the best in the country.
For that, though, he needs new productions. Yet creating new things is an immense challenge in times of war. During the months when they were mostly unable to work, he says, the artists declined from their peaks. Muscles lost their tone while singers and musicians were unable to practice "If you don’t practice for a day,” says Koloyan, "you notice yourself. If you don’t practice for two days, your teacher notices. If you don’t practice for three days, the audience notices.”
In western Ukraine, to which hundreds of thousands of internally displaced Ukrainians had fled, Tulusov and Kaloyan were unable to find a theater in a position to allow so many artists a temporary stage.
But then, Tulusov came up with the idea of organizing a Europe tour. In 2022, 200 singers, musicians, dancers and some of their family members traveled first to Lithuania and then to Slovakia. Antonova brought along her two children. The ensemble then toured through 14 additional countries, including Germany, where they performed Giacomo Puccini’s "Madama Butterfly” at the Admiralspalast in Berlin.
"The trip through Europe helped us maintain our abilities,” says Koloyan. "We learned to adjust our production to smaller stages.” That became important once they returned home last spring – where the cellar was waiting.
The subterranean stage presents the greatest challenge to the dancers. They are unable to perform any diagonal jumps, and because the ballet hall on the seventh floor is too dangerous, they rehearse in semi-darkness on the former great stage on the fourth floor, where they have rolled out linoleum between old decorations and brought in mobile ballet barres. Markings on the floor indicate the extent of the stage in the basement.
Practicing in the semi-darkness of the old stage.
The space available isn’t the problem, says Antonina Radievska, at least not the biggest problem. Instead of a long diagonal all the way across the stage, they just do two smaller ones, thus maintaining the necessary dynamism. The 42-year-old prima ballerina and chief choreographer draws eights in the air with both hands.
On the theater’s website, Radievska is identified with a different last name. The younger soloist to whom she was married and with whom she raised her daughter is no longer a part of the ensemble. He didn’t return to Ukraine. "My family was torn apart by the war,” says Radievska. She doesn’t try acting as though she has overcome the pain.
There has been some whispering in the ensemble that she tapped into her grief in her new piece "Dragon Songs.” It is an erotic ballet about love and betrayal, and critics have celebrated the performance as Radievska’s resurrection.
Before the war, she and her husband danced all of the great love stories in ballet history. Now, she has a new partner on stage. "I am dancing with a very young dancer, who likely never dreamed that he would be able to perform with someone like me.”
Ballet dancer and chief choreographer Antonina Radievska.
Prima ballerina and chief choreographer Antonina Radievska
The war demands many sacrifices, says Radievska, but it also provides opportunities. She says she always tells her young dancers: "Children, if the soloists we had before the war were still here, you would probably just be rearranging the backdrops.”
Chief stage director Koloyan pops his head through the door. Radievska complains to him about a colleague. "He does whatever he wants. I beg you, take care of it!”
It’s obvious, says Radievska, that all of them are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But she doesn’t care. "Either you work and create something, or you leave and get your psyche repaired.”
Tulusov has a board on the wall of his office on which he has scribbled physics formulas. On Saturdays, he still dips back into his old passion for science for a few hours. "Everyone knows that they aren’t allowed to disturb me,” he says. The rest of the week, though, Tulusov’s door is open.
He had no idea how difficult it could be to work with artists when he started at the theater. The most difficult moment, he says, was when the ensemble returned from its European tour. Those who had remained in Kharkiv had been exposed to such vastly different experiences than those who had performed at all the theaters in the West. "We had a lot of conflicts at the time,” he says. Luckily, though, he says, they subsided after a few weeks.
Before the war, the theater had 90 pieces in its repertoire, 30 of them ballet. Now, they have to choose which of them can be performed in the cellar. Tulusov’s favorite ballet, "Spartacus” – he can hold forth for several minutes about its premiere – is not among them. They have neither sufficient space nor enough male dancers.
The selection shrank even further when the theater had to remove all Russian composers from its program. In the first year of the war, the Ukrainian parliament banned performances by Russian artists and the presentation of Russian works. Two singers in the opera choir who had Russian passports were forced to leave.
The elimination of anything Russian has hit the ballet hard: no "Swan Lake,” no "Nutcracker,” no "Romeo and Juliet.” Tulusov hopes that the composer Peter Tchaikovsky, whose grandfather was from Ukraine, will ultimately be rehabilitated. "But this is not the right time for that.”
The director now wants to bring new works, Ukrainian works, to the stage. They already frequently stage the folkloric operas written by the Ukrainian romanticist Mykola Lysenko in the late 19th century. The most recent premier in April was a cabaret opera about the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko that Koloyan commissioned himself.
Once peace has returned, Tulusov hopes to bring international artists to the city and maybe even start a festival. For someone who has an unexploded Russian rocket on their roof, Tulusov’s dreams are grand. But that’s how everyone here sounds.
Up on the fourth floor, the soprano Yulia Antonova is still in her dressing room. There is one advantage, she says, to no longer being able to sing in the big theater. "At least I no longer have to wear the heavy stage makeup.”
Absent the war, the makeup artist would now be applying thick contours to her cheeks and nose along with extra-wide eyeliner. Stage makeup has to be dramatic so that all members of the audience, even those sitting at the back, can see the artists’ facial expressions. Down below in the cellar, that, at least, is no longer much of a concern.
Yulia Antonova rushing to the stage for the final act.
Five minutes before the director launches into the overture, Antonova, dressed in a corset dress, gets into the elevator to head down. She’s going to have to run a fair amount this evening. Three costume changes across four floors, because there isn’t enough room down below. She will hardly be in a position to hear the prompter, who is sitting on the steps at the side of the stage.
But she will sing and act, love and suffer, soak up the applause after her arias and then, with a shriek of pleasure, die of tuberculosis at the end. The loyal fans will line the stage to give the soloists flowers. And backstage, the old and new singers in Kharkiv will hug each other. "So spektaklem!” they will say, just as they always have. "Congratulations on the performance!”
