The renovations of the Zakaria Paliashvili Tbilisi State
Academic Theatre of Opera and Ballet (the Tbilisi Opera House) in Georgia are
near completion.
Opera performances had commenced from 1845 and the
Opera House commence construction from 1847. It was finished in 1851 to
accommodate the opera and ballet companies. It stands on the main street in
Tbilisi, Rustaveli Avenue. Designed by Italian architect Giovanni Scudieri in
the Moorish style, it was originally called the Tiflis Imperial Theatre.
The Russian governor-general, Prince Mikhail
Vorontsov, commissioned Scudieri (1817-1851) to build public buildings in
Odessa, Ukraine, after which he was sent to Tbilisi where he was appointed
chief architect of Tbilisi from 1848. In Tbilisi he built the Vorontsov Bridge
(1848), the first stone bridge in the city and the caravanserai (1850), a
four-storey multi-function building with restaurants and shops. He had
oversight of the Imperial Theatre (the Opera House), which was finished in
1851, and the military cathedral (1851), an Eastern Orthodox cathedral for the
Russian armed forces. He died during the construction of the cathedral.
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It was rebuilt after a fire in October 1874
completely destroyed the building. It reopened in 1896. In 1937 it was renamed
to honour the Georgian composer Zakaria Paliashvili. In the 1990s funds were
not available for maintenance and hence it was due for renovations, which
commenced in 2010/2011. Expected to reopen at the end of 2014, it is nearing
completion.
On the left side of the building is a statue of
George Balanchine, born Giorgi Melitonovitch Balanchivadze (1904-1983) in Saint
Petersburg. He was a choreographer, moving to New York where he lived until he
died. He also has a crater on the planet Mercury named in his honour.
As an aside, an experiment with mice with heart transplants
showed that they survived longer when listening to opera. Masateru Uchiyama of
Juntendo University Hospital in Tokyo, Japan, gave mice heart transplants in
2011. For a week after the operation the mice were divided into four groups and
exposed to different music: Verdi’s opera La
Traviata, Mozart’s concertos, Enya, and a range of tones. The group that
listened to tones survived for only 7 days; the Enya group survived for 11
days; the group listening to Mozart survived for 20 days, and the opera group
survived an average of 26 days. Blood tests revealed that opera appeared to
slow down organ rejection by calming the immune system (revealed by the lower concentration
of interleukin-2 and gamma interferon – both of which promote inflammation –
and higher levels of interleukins 4 and 10, which reduce infection). Uchiyama
thinks that the harmony of the opera and Mozart’s concertos may be important
for heart benefits.
The research team tested the effects of La Traviata on deaf mice too. They
survived for just 7 days after a heart transplant, reinforcing the fact that
they actually need to hear the music to have any benefit from it. Even if the
research is not conclusive, for they also tested Verdi’s opera and not other
composers’ works, it doesn’t harm to keep testing the opera theory – for mice
and humans.
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