Olivia Giovetti

The Lviv National Opera opened to the public on 4 October 1900. It has remained open for the last 125 years under nine different governing authorities, including the Habsburg Empire, the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union. One consistent commitment throughout that time has been to preserve and perform Ukrainian operas and ballets, an effort that was redoubled following the full-scale invasion in 2022.

During the curtain call for the closing performance of Verdi’s Il trovatore at the Royal Opera House on 19 July, one of the cast, Danni Perry, took their bow holding a Palestinian flag. The moment, filmed by several people in the audience, went viral, with videos showing someone appearing from the wings and trying to wrest the flag from Perry’s hands.

Mussorgsky’s alcoholism caught up with him before he could finish Khovanshchina. At the time of his death in 1881 he had completed a piano score but hadn’t begun the orchestration. He was also still working out the final act, where, after Golitsyn is exiled and Khovansky is killed, the Old Believers opt for martyrdom by self-immolation in protest against the tsar.

When Verdi’s Nabucco was first performed in 1842, Milanese audiences were quick to see their own situation under Austrian occupation reflected in the plot, a loose adaptation of the Biblical story of the madness of Nebuchadnezzar and the plight of the exiled Judeans in Babylon.

Last Friday afternoon, shortly after the Palestinian writer and researcher Salman Abu Sitta had said that ‘the voice of the victim is silenced, denied, condemned and vilified,’ the German police cut the power to the Palästina-Kongress in Berlin.