Opera as a Site of Colonial Resistance: The Tiflis Imperial Theater in the Russian Empire

• In Event: Art and Anti-Colonial Resistance in the South Caucasus

Abstract

The Tiflis Imperial Theater, founded in 1851 in today’s Tbilisi, was conceived as a colonial institution designed to impose Russian cultural hegemony in the Caucasus. Built under the direction of Viceroy Mikhail Vorontsov, the goal of the first theater in Transcaucasia was to "civilize" the Georgian population and assimilate them into the Russian imperial fold through exposure to European and Russian musical traditions. Rather than simply serving as a tool of imperial domination, however, the theater became a paradoxical space where Georgian artists worked towards the creation of their own national tradition.

By the late 19th century, a group of Georgian composers led by Zakaria Paliashvili had established the beginnings of the Georgian national school, setting its roots in European Romanticism. While this budding national tradition was quickly snuffed out by the Soviet invasion of 1921, the progress made in the Russian Empire led to a flowering of Georgian culture in the years of independence (1918-1921), including the premiere of the first Georgian opera, Paliashvili’s Abesalom and Eteri, in 1919.

This paper examines the shifting role of the Tiflis Imperial Theater within the broader framework of Russian colonialism, highlighting how Georgian artists repurposed an imperial institution to assert their own national identity. Drawing on archival materials, period reviews, and Soviet-era historiography, this study complicates the conventional understanding of cultural institutions as mere extensions of empire, demonstrating how the opera house became a contested space where colonial influence and national pride coexisted in dynamic tension.

Author

• Céleste Pagniello, Princeton U