In late 2024, two extraordinary events sent ripples through the operatic scenes of Central Asia’s cultural hubs: Almaty, Kazakhstan and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Both were opera premieres, performed by local artists with the collaboration of Western set designers and directors. Significantly, each production broke from the long-standing tradition of reviving nineteenth-century Western operas or Soviet-era works, turning instead to the era of Mongol rule in Central Asia. Beyond this shared departure, the two productions diverged sharply. The production of the Almaty Opera and Ballet Theatre, titled Khan-Sultan: Altyn-Orda, was composed at breakneck speed by Kazakh composer Khamit Shangaliyev. It tells the story of Khan-Sultan, the third wife of Jochi, son of Genghis Khan. The first act culminates in Jochi’s death, mourned by his three wives. Khan-Sultan, recognising her precarious position, attempts to save her eldest son Berke by sending him to the camp of Batu Khan, Jochi’s brother. Midway through the opera, the spirit of Genghis Khan appears on a levitating throne, delivering an aria laden with prophecy. The work concludes with the rise of the Golden Horde, in which – according to the libretto – Khan-Sultan played a pivotal role, securing her sons’ prominence in the Ulus of Jochi. This narrative reflects a revisionist turn in Kazakhstan’s official historiography in recent years: the Mongol Empire is framed no longer as a colonising force that obliterated the sedentary cultures of twelfth- to thirteenth-century Central Asia but rather as a progenitor of modern Kazakh statehood. For the production, the theatre installed a state-of-the-art LED screen displaying an immense tree throughout the performance – a symbol, as the theatre’s director explained to me, of the heroine’s spiritual strength and wisdom.Footnote ¹ The premiere was a high-profile social event, complete with a red carpet and sold-out tickets. Yet neither the LED spectacle nor the bold storyline could salvage the opera’s reception: the archaic plot alienated audiences, and the music – 80% recitative – was widely panned. Many left before the final curtain. But the point here transcends artistic merit: the opera served as a vehicle for crafting a new political identity, much as the genre did when it first took root in Kazakhstan in the 1930s.Footnote ²

Tashkent’s production, by contrast, was a revival of Handel’s Tamerlano, staged for the first time in Uzbekistan to mark the 300th anniversary of its London premiere. The cast blended Uzbek and international soloists, while the most striking feature was the fusion of a Western orchestra with traditional Uzbek instruments, a choir, and the karnay-surnay ensemble Uzbegim – a total of over 160 performers. Before the curtain rose, a musicologist colleague and I, leafing through the programme, scoffed at the idea of Baroque music interwoven with Central Asian karnay. Yet the synthesis of styles and eras was executed with astonishing finesse. Less successful was Stefano Poda’s postmodern staging: overburdened with detail, it distracted from the music and voices, muddling rather than illuminating. While Kazakhstan’s Mongol-themed opera aligns with its recent ideological pivot, for Uzbekistan, Tamerlane has long been a symbol of post-Soviet nationhood. The challenge, or perhaps the solution, lay in reconciling eighteenth-century Western Orientalism with contemporary Uzbek nationalism. The premiere coincided with the World Conference on Creative Economy, where both events strategically deployed Orientalist aesthetics as a recognisable trope: one that could be converted into tourism development and foreign investment.

Almaty and Tashkent inherited opera from the Soviet Union, where it emerged under Stalin as a surrogate for the political sovereignty the region had been losing since the mid-nineteenth century. What developed was a circuit of legitimation: opera endowed capitals with an aura of authenticity, transforming theatres into liminal spaces where citizens both witnessed their rulers and internalised the curated mythology of the collective self through a performative construction of nationhood, thus engaging in spectacles of power despite constrained political agency. Capitals, in turn, sustained opera as an institution, providing it with prestige, infrastructure and captive audiences. After the demise of the Soviet Union this symbiosis seemed obsolete. Yet, as the 2024 premieres demonstrate, opera endures precisely because – while retaining its palimpsest qualities, semantically legible to past audiences – it remains a malleable medium for crafting new collective identities. Why stage Tamerlano in Soviet-built Tashkent rather than Timurid Samarkand? Why does Almaty anchor Kazakhstan’s reframing of its Mongol-era history? The answer, as I will demonstrate, lies in the unbroken symbiosis between opera and capital city: a stage for mutual reinvention where the two sustain one another. This alliance thrives not merely through the material infrastructure of operatic venues – though opera houses retain the typological imprint of Greek amphitheatres – but also by codifying cultural hierarchies, thereby conflating aesthetic value with political legitimacy. This article traces the genealogy of this dynamic, focusing on non-Western contexts. The research begins in the past but arrives at the fraught yet inventive present of Central Asian opera.

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Consider another example, from North Africa, where opera emerged relatively late and, from its inception, functioned as a vehicle of political expression. In January 2019, the Associated Press released a video in which French president Emmanuel Macron, accompanied by his Egyptian homologue Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, visited an opera house under construction in the new Egyptian capital.Footnote ³ Historically, Egypt was among the first non-European countries to stage operas: its first theatre was created as early as 1869 under Ismail Pasha as part of a large-scale remodelling of Cairo, aimed at westernising Egyptian society.Footnote ⁴ The venue was inaugurated by a performance of Rigoletto in November 1869.Footnote ⁵ Aida, originally conceived as the inaugural opera for Cairo’s new theatre, premiered in 1871 – marking the beginning of opera’s enduring entanglement with Egyptian statecraft. When the theatre burned down a century later, Japan financed its reconstruction in an Islamic architectural idiom.Footnote ⁶ This trajectory reveals how Egypt’s operatic institutions have functioned as dual instruments: internally as assertions of cultural development, and externally as tools of diplomacy or soft power (not necessarily Egypt’s own) – their productions increasingly mobilised for both domestic legitimation and international positioning since the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷

In recent years, the intention to relocate the seat of government to the New Administrative Capital (NAC) located to the east of Cairo has caused ongoing resentment in Egyptian society, not least because officials and businesses have been under strong pressure to move their headquarters to NAC. Yet the government has firmly maintained the project, allegedly because in recent years Cairo has become increasingly congested and ‘a fresh start’ was needed.Footnote ⁸ In April 2024, president al-Sisi marked the official transition of power by taking his third consecutive constitutional oath at NAC, cementing its status as Egypt’s new seat of government. While relocating the capital could be justified by pragmatic concerns – real estate being Egypt’s sole commodity to appreciate consistently through the political and economic upheavals of the 2010s – the decision to build yet another opera house is a different story.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, as Donato Somma has recently shown, Cairo’s current Opera House has struggled with stale programming and indifferent local audiences ever since its inauguration in 1988.Footnote ¹⁰ Hence there was little need for a new theatre as a physical space. As a symbol, however, it provided gravitas to the new capital.

Egypt has not been the only country to take opera to heart in the twenty-first century. In 2016 a brand-new opera theatre was inaugurated in Algiers: the forty-million-dollar project was presented as a ‘gift’ of the Chinese government to Algeria.Footnote ¹¹ In 2007–16, Bahrain, Dubai, Kuwait and Oman built similar venues in their capitals.Footnote ¹² Recently, the government of Kazakhstan sponsored the construction of two new theatres with permanent opera and ballet troupes in its new capital city, Astana. Unlike Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic states, all of which had founded their opera houses in the nineteenth century, Central Asian republics established their theatres in the 1930s, under the tutelage of the Soviet authorities. However, post-communist governments did not rush to get rid of opera despite de-sovietisation in other spheres of public life. Of the five post-Soviet Central Asian states, only Turkmenistan banned opera. In 2001, President Saparmurat Niyazov outlawed it, claiming it threatened Turkmen culture with Western influence. The ban persisted until 2019, when a Turkmen–Italian co-production of Pagliacci premiered in Ashgabat, a fleeting thaw following Niyazov’s death in 2006. These developments inevitably raise questions: Why do nations worldwide continue to invest in opera houses – constructing them in capital cities, sustaining them with public funds – long after opera has faded from mainstream cultural relevance? More intriguingly, why do even states without operatic traditions pursue such projects?

Capitals universally serve as seats of power, symbols of state authority and stages for grand ceremonies – attracting domestic and foreign visitors and justifying investment in architecture and culture.Footnote ¹³ Despite opera houses clustering overwhelmingly in capital cities, the historical interplay between them remains underexplored, a consequence of disciplinary silos where fields of scholarship persist as isolated monads. In an essay published in 2009, William Weber suggested that opera could be used as a lens to investigate the so-called ‘capital authority’ – a hybrid of political and cultural influence which eighteenth-century London and Paris exerted on the rest of Europe.Footnote ¹⁴ According to Weber, opera’s high status and prestige stemmed largely from the sense of empowerment that its venues, as elite gathering spaces par excellence, provided to their audiences. Viewing the phenomenon through a Wallersteinian lens, Weber argues that Europe’s key operatic capitals internally colonised the continent’s cultural periphery: initially patronised by monarchs, later appropriated by aristocrats and the urban bourgeoisie, and ultimately transformed by the rise of a modern audience. Yet, given that most of the opera houses built in the past hundred years lie outside Europe, a more comprehensive approach is now necessary – one that treats opera as a global phenomenon with diverse repercussions.Footnote ¹⁵

In a wider context of examining opera’s global significance, postcolonial scholars have predominantly examined its relationship with capital cities through the lens of the genre’s perceived foreignness to non-western cultures.Footnote ¹⁶ Edward Said’s seminal study provides an instance of such critique: discussing the production of Aida for Cairo, he concludes that, ‘Aida, like the opera form itself, [was] a hybrid, radically impure work that [belonged] equally to the history of culture and the historical experience of overseas domination.’Footnote ¹⁷ While opera did play a role in Egypt’s colonisation, one flaw in Said’s approach is its unintentional essentialism. Do purely non-hybrid, ‘authentic’ genres of music or performance truly exist at all? This logic extends to capital cities as well. As historically constructed spaces, the study of their evolution requires scrutiny, not a priori assumptions on their defining features. Frantz Fanon, echoing Rousseau,Footnote ¹⁸ contrasted the inhabitants of colonial capitals – a gilded cage for the assimilated elite – with the rest of the country’s population.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet this binary, while rhetorically potent, is illusory. Colonial capitals were never hermetically sealed, and their inhabitants navigated cultural institutions for prestige, pleasure, mimicry, subversion or profit. Moreover, peripheral artists have long sustained these urban stages.

In response to the limitations of such dichotomies, Homi Bhabha proposed a different approach to hybridity.Footnote ²⁰ By reconceptualising it as an ambivalent space where cultural meanings are negotiated rather than imposed, his framework offers an alternative for understanding opera’s global trajectories. Though Bhabha never addressed opera directly, his theorisation of cultural translation is useful for examining how non-European capitals appropriated and transformed the genre. Many of their productions became dynamic sites of reinvention – where European conventions were not just imposed but actively reinterpreted. The Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, for instance, rivalled European houses in prestige while incubating distinctly Argentine works, such as Alberto Ginastera’s Bomarzo, which fused avant-garde modernism with Latin American mythology. Similarly, Rio de Janeiro’s Theatro Municipal premiered operas by Carlos Gomes, whose Il Guarany adapted an Indigenous Brazilian narrative into the bel canto form, asserting racial miscegenation and other features of Brazil’s national identity within a globalised genre. The same could be said of Cape Town’s Artscape Opera House, where post-apartheid productions like Princess Magogo reclaimed opera as an African genre. These and other examples complicate postcolonial narratives that frame opera solely as a tool of empire, demanding an approach that recognises its fluidity as both an instrument of cultural hegemony and a medium for creative intervention or subversion – precisely the tension that conventional postcolonial readings often flatten.

Geopolitical factors should be considered, too. While Verdi could accept a commission to compose Aida for the sake of the money or out of vanity, one still wonders what inspired non-European rulers, such as Ismail Pasha, to build opera theatres willingly and to bring European troupes to their capitals in a conscious effort.Footnote ²¹ Was opera solely or chiefly a tool of westernisation or was it also an endeavour, as seen in the case of Egypt, to position the country as sort of great power vis-à-vis the rest of Africa? While questioning opera’s role beyond the Global North is useful, it’s equally important to ask who introduced opera to non-Western contexts and why, where theatres were built, and how these cultural monuments were intertwined with political projects. Urban, operatic and postcolonial studies offer useful perspectives, but the opera-to-capital city relationship requires its own approach.

This study argues that opera offered capital cities a unique mode of legitimation, one that neither art nor state ideology could replicate. Yet the purpose here is not to catalogue how opera’s legitimising power compared to that of other institutions. Rather, it is to expose how it was strategically deployed and reinterpreted across distinct historical contexts – reshaping its meaning under colonial rule and postcolonial nation-building. The question, then, is not merely whether and how opera served to legitimise state power, but how its materiality and symbolism were instrumentalised to serve competing visions of authority in a distinct space of capital cities across time and place. The concept of legitimation draws on Max Weber’s typology of authority (legal, traditional and charismatic), which explains how states and their actors sustain consensual, non-coercive rule.Footnote ²² Applying this framework to the historical analysis of capital cities reveals how opera imbued them with symbolic and social meaning, becoming their must-have attribute – even though not all capitals sustained vibrant operatic traditions, nor did they necessarily require them. In the following pages, I will trace the intertwined histories of opera and capital cities (primarily in Europe, though not exclusively) to examine how the former bolstered the latter’s legitimacy. The examples provided will be neither exhaustive nor deeply detailed, as a comprehensive study would exceed the scope of a single article. Instead, my aim is to outline key patterns and propose a tentative framework for future research.

The subsequent section will examine the intertwined history of opera and Almaty (formerly Alma-Ata), Kazakhstan’s Soviet-era capital, where the country’s first opera theatre was established in the 1930s – shortly after the city became its long-term seat of government under the Soviet regime. In the 1990s, following independence from the USSR, President Nursultan Nazarbayev ordered the government’s relocation to Astana, echoing justifications later used by Egyptian authorities: the need to ‘break with the past’ and ‘forge a new national image’.Footnote ²³ To legitimise the new capital, Astana was endowed with cultural institutions, including – as Nazarbayev’s personal ‘dream’ – a lavish opera house.Footnote ²⁴ Paradoxically, this theatre bears a striking resemblance to Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre and perpetuates Soviet-era staging traditions, despite its symbolic rupture with the past.

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Before proceeding further, let me briefly outline the early history of opera and its ties to capital cities – familiar terrain for many of the readers of this journal, but useful for situating the argument that follows. Opera originated in Florence, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in the late Cinquecento. By the mid-seventeenth century, it had spread to other capitals of the Italian peninsula, including Venice, Lucca, Rome and Naples, where Charles III commissioned the construction of a grandiose opera house, symbolising progress and the flourishing of culture under his reign.Footnote ²⁵ On the other side of the Alps, France became, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, another centre of operatic culture with the court and the opera, as its attribute, oscillating between Paris and Versailles.Footnote ²⁶ The eighteenth century saw opera’s bond with capital cities strengthen: the centralisation of states demanded a sedentary concentration of power, requiring lavish places for elite gathering. Simultaneously, composers and impresarios relied on the infrastructure and audiences that only major cities could provide. This mutual dependence further institutionalised opera within capitals, as evidenced by the careers of prominent composers who were drawn to major political centres. Mozart’s correspondence starkly contrasts Salzburg – with its ‘listeners akin to tables and chairs’ and lack of notable theatre – with vibrant Vienna, where he chose to work as a freelancer.Footnote ²⁷ The nineteenth century democratised opera’s audience while amplifying its social role.Footnote ²⁸ Composers and librettists increasingly addressed burning political and social issues such as self-determination, sometimes beyond their homelands.Footnote ²⁹

Opera’s expansion beyond Europe became a significant trend during the long nineteenth century. The desire to found theatres in the colonial capitals of European empires was not merely a caprice of their overseas governors. Staging operas allowed authorities to carry out a mission civilisatrice, employ metropolitan architects and engineers, and put domestic styles and cultural references to the indigenous soil as cultural and political signposts.Footnote ³⁰ France provided a textbook example of how a metropolitan language could be adjusted to colonial conditions: impressive opera houses erected in Algiers in the 1860s, as well as in Hanoi and Saigon between 1897 and 1911, attest to that.Footnote ³¹

Opera was then gradually appropriated by non-Western elites, who used its physical and symbolic space to invent and disseminate a staging of collective identities that were markedly different from the past or ‘traditional’ ones. For those elites – and for the capitals they built – opera became a tool that allowed public culture to be brought to the standards of ‘modern’ and ‘western’, which were in high demand. Adam Mestyan notes that the construction of the Egyptian opera was commissioned by Ismail Pasha before the British occupation in 1882 – although in the 1860s Egypt was already effectively a British colony in economic terms de facto, if not yet de jure. Footnote ³² The example of Egypt is not exceptional. In Japan opera first appeared as an entertainment for expatriates in the late nineteenth century. Soon, however, it evolved into an art for domestic consumption. For the first time, a European opera had been performed entirely by the students at the Tokyo College of Music in 1903 (under the direction of a French conductor), while in the 1900s Japanese composers were already creating opera-like works.Footnote ³³ After the foundation of the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo in 1911, Japan saw its own fully fledged operas.Footnote ³⁴ In this and other cases, one notices a series of common patterns: the binding of opera to capital cities, which had a sufficient number of aficionados among natives and expatriates, and the appropriation of the genre first through popular Western works, followed later by crystallisation of authentic repertoire.

The twentieth century saw a long-lasting decline in the production of new operas in favour of restaging older ones, while by contrast, new capitals proliferated due to the steady increase in sovereign states, from about fifty in the early 1900s to almost two hundred in the late twentieth century. Many of those capitals were located where former colonial seats of government had been established in the past.Footnote ³⁵ They moved when post-imperial governments needed to demonstrate a symbolic break with the past, or because new territorial boundaries demanded fresh approaches to centrality.Footnote ³⁶ Former colonial ports, for instance, were convenient as capitals – serving as a link between the colony and the metropole – but proved unsuitable for independent nations. Once the new seats of government emerged, their authorities hastened to build the opera houses. Until approximately the 1930s, opera played largely the same role in the symbolic legitimation of capital cities as it did in the nineteenth century. The theatres that were built during that period – Prague’s Národní Divadlo, the Avenida Theatre in Buenos Aires, to name but two – became a haven of solid values in a rapidly changing world.Footnote ³⁷

In the mid-twentieth century (from c.1930 to the 1970s), the state increased its role as the contractor of theatres and the operatic infrastructure in state and regional capitals. The most striking example of that new approach was the USSR: fresh operatic troupes staged new and old operas in cutting-edge theatres across the Union, even in those republics where operatic tradition had not existed before. The same was true for many capitals in North Africa, Middle East and South America. While opera theatres could have lost some of their importance as a locus of elite gathering in the post-war period, the value of symbolic legitimation that they still provided to capital cities – and, by extension, to the states, which they represented materially and symbolically – made governments invest in them despite the triumph of mass culture and the contempt of post-war baby-boomers for what was perceived as an ‘elitist’ art.Footnote ³⁸ Paradoxically, this was true even for the countries with strong anti-colonial ideologies.

Yet another trend derives from a new wave of operatic transnationalism, as well as the glamorisation of opera, increasingly perceived as a product for status consumption, now at the state level, rather than that of individuals or social classes. Opera houses continue being impressive from an architectural point of view, such as the recently opened ones in Muscat (the capital of Oman), Dubai (the capital of the United Arab Emirates), Manama (the capital of Bahrain) and Doha (the capital of Qatar).Footnote ³⁹ Yet it is striking that these opera houses were erected in the states that lack both operatic tradition and minimal infrastructure for training musicians and artists: foreign performers usually land in these capitals for selected performances and depart immediately after the show. Another feature of Middle Eastern capitals in the twenty-first century, such as, in particular, Dubai or Doha, is that the majority of their population – up to ninety per cent – comprises expatriates. The construction workers who erected their new opera venues were also expatriates: chiefly, labour migrants from South Asian countries. These workers often laboured under terrible conditions even as star architects distanced themselves, claiming no responsibility.Footnote ⁴⁰ There’s nothing new in this: many beautiful capitals we admire today, such as St Petersburg, were constructed by slaves or through de facto slave labour. Even in the mid-twentieth century, Tashkent’s Opera Theatre was built by Japanese prisoners of war, while many other Soviet cultural venues relied on internal slaves, the Gulag prisoners.

Still, twenty-first century neoliberalism adds a distinct twist to this phenomenon. Opera houses in Muscat, Dubai, Manama and Doha – constructed by expatriates and catering primarily to foreign audiences – function as enclaves where imported art entertains an imported elite. Thus, while in some capitals opera retains its historical role as a tool for legitimising a given city’s status nationally and internationally, in others, it becomes a kind of cargo cult: a hollow imitation, superficially resembling the original form but lacking the cultural and social foundations that sustain it.Footnote ⁴¹ Werner Herzog masterfully explores opera as a form of cargo cult in Fitzcarraldo, starring Klaus Kinski as Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald – better known by his adopted name, Fitzcarraldo, an eccentric dreamer obsessed with bringing opera to the Peruvian Amazon. His quest is to drag an entire steamship over a mountain to fund his grand vision, battling nature, economics and sheer impossibility in his obsessive pursuit. The massive boat hauled over the mountain is not just a feat of will but a farcical exaggeration of opera’s own excesses – its demand for suspension of disbelief and ‘lack of verisimilitude’.Footnote ⁴² In this light, the opera house Fitzcarraldo dreams of is both a caricature of a civilising mission and a monument to futility. Just as cargo cults reconstruct the outward signs of modernity without its infrastructure, Fitzcarraldo recreates opera’s grandeur without its cultural scaffolding, turning it into a sublime absurdity.

Herzog’s film represents opera as an individual’s quixotic obsession, echoing an era when it was the domain of patrons and impresarios rather than states. Today, the phenomenon seems to have inverted: opera can no longer be a private folly. It evolved, instead, into a status commodity of highest scale, no longer tied to individual or class prestige but elevated to the level of state symbolism. During fieldwork in the Middle East in 2024, I observed a recurring pattern: opera houses, despite their grandeur, host infrequent, irregular productions, often doubling as multipurpose venues for concerts, exhibitions and even sporting events, such as Qatar’s 2022 World Cup. This functional ambiguity stems from economic pragmatism: state-funded theatres must offset exorbitant maintenance costs. Yet it also reveals a deeper void – the absence of a pipeline for local artists, critics or season subscribers, and the lack of an ideological framework akin to nineteenth-century Europe or the Soviet Union. The head of Dubai Opera, for instance, emphasised the venue’s transformative stage technology over repertoire, underscoring its priority as a flexible event space despite being a cultural institution.Footnote ⁴³ The opera houses in Doha and Manama are architecturally striking, yet their artistic output remains negligible; only a handful of productions have been staged in recent years.Footnote ⁴⁴ Muscat, by contrast, presents a more dynamic operatic scene, with dozens of performances mounted in the last few years. However, these were all executed by visiting artists, and the theatre itself neither maintains nor discloses attendance figures. In Abu Dhabi, the most recent Puccini Opera Gala took place in a hybrid complex combining a five-star resort with a high-end entertainment centre. Notably, alongside its newly built opera house, Abu Dhabi has also welcomed branches of several international museums. The most prominent among them – the Louvre Abu Dhabi – stands out for its impressive permanent collection, organised around a novel curatorial concept that traces the interconnected evolution of global cultures. This approach marks a deliberate departure from major Western museums, where displays of looted non-Western artefacts often serve as mere preludes to the ‘main’ narrative of European art. The Louvre Abu Dhabi has since become a cultural magnet, attracting both local and international visitors while setting a new benchmark for museological aesthetics and exhibition design. Why, then, has this model succeeded where opera struggles, despite both being imported institutions meant to embody a capital’s prestige? The answer perhaps lies in their flexibility: whereas museum collections thrive on adaptive curation, opera remains a rigid art form – reproducible as a one-time show but resistant to transplantation into non-operatic soil. In this sense, opera stands in stark contrast to another Florentine invention of the early modern era: banks, which seamlessly globalised by adapting to local contexts.

To conclude, post-colonial capitals have engaged with opera in diverse ways – sometimes as recipients, sometimes as reinterpreters – transforming the European genre to serve distinct local agendas. Whether driven by status anxiety, a need for legitimation, or genuine aspiration to participate in local or global culture, these cities use opera as both a medium and a proxy. It functions simultaneously as a tool for nation-branding and a performative assertion of successful capitality. Yet the reduced emphasis on ‘tradition’ can create space for experimental fusion while multipurpose architectural monuments might democratise access to elite cultural forms. Central Asia’s operatic journey – which we shall now explore – demonstrates how the art form’s transplantation can yield unexpected hybridities, challenging Eurocentric paradigms while expanding opera’s conceptual and performative boundaries.

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Kazakhstan’s seat of government shifted three times in the twentieth century: initially from Orenburg to Kzyl-Orda in 1925, subsequently to Almaty (formerly Alma-Ata) in 1928–9, and finally settling in Astana in 1997.Footnote ⁴⁵ During the 1920s the relocations were emblematic of the broader upheaval within Central Asia and the entirety of the Soviet Union: the post-revolutionary redrawing of boundaries and the consequent formation of new administrative hubs were critical measures for Bolsheviks to strengthen their fragile power. Then many national and provincial capitals were relocated, affecting all principal Soviet republics such as Russia (St Petersburg to Moscow), Ukraine (Kharkiv to Kyiv), Uzbekistan (Samarkand to Tashkent) and so forth. While cities such as Moscow or Kyiv possessed requisite infrastructure and were well-positioned to serve as capitals, others like Almaty needed many improvements to become appealing as both urbs and civitas.

I argue that opera was instrumental in establishing Almaty’s legitimacy as a verisimilar capital of Kazakhstan following the relocation of the seat of government in the late 1920s. Indeed, opera served not merely as a marker or a derivative of its new status – as seen in other contexts across the globe – but rather a way of performing the role of capital city in early Soviet Kazakhstan. In this sense, opera constituted a critical venue for the invention of Kazakhstan’s distinct identity within Stalin’s USSR. The significance of opera grew substantially following the political transformation of Kazakhstan in 1936, when a novel Soviet Constitution restructured the country from an autonomous state within the Russian Federation to a Union republic. A pivotal event marking the celebration of Kazakhstan’s elevated status was the premiere of a new epic opera, Yer-Targyn, ordered for this occasion from Evgeny Brusilovsky, a composer hailing from St Petersburg who relocated to Kazakhstan in 1933. At that time, epic genre became highly sought after – so much so that librettists began imposing elements of class struggle on them, even though such themes had never been present when these epics were first recorded.Footnote ⁴⁶ The plot of Yer-Targyn aligned seamlessly with the ideological imperatives of high Stalinism: a folk hero rises against treacherous khans conspiring to fracture the state and foreign invaders.

Yer-Targyn was met with resounding success.Footnote ⁴⁷ By 1936, Almaty had already developed a capital-city culture that embraced the displacement of traditional music and performance with new genres – such as opera – which served a dual purpose: signalling socialist modernity while performing a carefully curated local identity.Footnote ⁴⁸ This transformation was facilitated by state-sponsored arts and crafts, positioning Almaty as both a Soviet and national centre. This early Soviet cultural project was its own form of institutionalised Orientalism, distinct from Europe’s exoticising traditions. Unlike Handel’s Tamerlano or Verdi’s Aida, where ‘the East’ was imagined from afar, Soviet composers in Almaty and Tashkent were expected to engage directly with local traditions. Some faked, stole or mimicked those traditions, but the attempts were still solid enough to be staged and in some cases remain in the repertoire for more than a season.Footnote ⁴⁹ Whereas eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European Orientalism reinforced its ideological foundations through exoticised storytelling and racialised aesthetics, the USSR rejected Western colonialism rhetorically while advancing its own hierarchical vision of modernity – one in which a non-Russian culture could be celebrated only insofar as it conformed to the socialist mould.

Another difference was that, unlike one-off European productions on Oriental themes, Soviet opera was a highly centralised venture, which at the time could only be provided by a capital city. Almaty and Tashkent became hubs where local poets, writers, artists and musicians flocked in pursuit of Soviet education – a pathway to stable employment and recognition. Simultaneously, professionals from Moscow and St Petersburg, trained in Western classical traditions, saw an opportunity to market their skills in the Soviet East. Across Central Asia, capitals saw the construction of theatres and educational institutions tasked with cultivating local talent in line with the official ideology.Footnote ⁵⁰

Almaty at the time defied conventional notions of a capital as a powerful urban centre designed to connect and govern the nation. Electricity and basic infrastructure were scarce, and monumental architecture was virtually nonexistent. Streets remained unpaved until 1935, reinforcing the city’s image as a remote outpost.Footnote ⁵¹ Many perceived the town as a place of exile – or, for some, a quiet refuge in which to weather the upheavals of the 1930s, marked by famines and purges.Footnote ⁵² Urban improvements were slow due to the Soviet Union’s focus on rapid industrialisation during the First Five-Year Plans, which imposed strict construction limits. With resources diverted to factories and railways, urban development was restricted to a few essential government buildings. The aforementioned Evgeny Brusilovsky recalled:

This passage captures Almaty’s identity as a town sustained by humble, labour-intensive systems. The aryks, in particular, embodied the city’s reliance on communal effort and agrarian rhythms. The new image of the capital slowly emerged from this provincial substrate – with new social practices that signalled the city’s elevated status, the arrival of officials, and state-guided terraforming. The first representative edifice became the House of Government, completed in 1931. The House was designed in constructivist style, and so it became light, unpretentious and open to the public. The architect, Moisei Ginsburg, envisioned that the hall could be used as a cinema, as well as the venue for large public meetings. The original plan saw a garden with a swimming pool on the flat rooftop, an idea that never materialised.

By the early 1930s, the era of the New Economic Policy and avant-garde experimentation had ended. As the government grew more distant from the people, classicism solidified as the official architectural style. Meanwhile, Stalin demanded that composers, librettists and playwrights create works that were ‘national in form, socialist in content’ – a directive that shaped artistic production under tightening ideological control.Footnote ⁵⁵ How to achieve this was unclear though. Central Asians complained that Moscow did not provide them with examples to emulate, and an excessive focus on the Indigenous substrate drew ridicule from locals and disapproval from expatriates.Footnote ⁵⁶

The new opera house in Almaty (GATOB) emerged as a symbol of transition – bridging eras and approaches to state-building.Footnote ⁵⁷ Plans for its construction were launched with a design competition in 1928.Footnote ⁵⁸ ‘Among cultural institutions, theatre is the most available tool of propaganda for the construction of the socialist society’, read the competition rules.Footnote ⁵⁹ The call attracted many interesting architects, and the first prize was awarded to Nikolai Kruglov’s avant-garde design. The theatre was to overlook a vast square, facing the House of Government on the opposite side. However, following an intervention by Levon Mirzoyan, then First Secretary of Kazakhstan’s Communist Party, the design shifted from radical modernism to classicism. Kruglov was arrested in 1937 and died in exile shortly afterward. GATOB was completed in 1941, opening with a Kazakh-language performance of Muslim Magomaev’s Nargiz. Footnote ⁶⁰ Located opposite the modest two-storey House of Government, the theatre was lavish and monumental. The highest building in town, it perched on elevated ground that effectively blocked the latter’s view of the mountains. Though separated by mere years in construction, the two buildings belonged to different worlds: GATOB symbolised the triumph of Stalinist Culture Two over the early Soviet era, with its bold experiments and post-revolutionary euphoria.Footnote ⁶¹

Opera houses have long functioned as symbols of power and prestige – yet rarely have they truly embodied capital status per se. The Almaty Opera Theatre was an anomaly: before its completion, no such structure existed anywhere in Kazakhstan or Central Asia (Uzbekistan’s counterpart would not emerge until 1947). The colonial logic of opera was inescapable: in the 1930s most artists, musicians and composers were either expatriates or Kazakhs trained in Moscow or St Petersburg. Architecturally, the theatre echoed St Petersburg’s Alexandrinsky Theatre, though an integration of local motifs paid tribute to Kazakh culture. Still, this was no mere mimicry. Performers mastered bel canto technique, yet the repertoire remained rooted in regional lore. Local artists and spectators reclaimed the form, weaving it into the fabric of their own imagination and worldview.

To develop, an opera theatre required not just a building, but an urban ecosystem. The initial impetus came in 1930 with the completion of the Turkestan–Siberian Railway (Turksib), which exponentially increased the flow of people and goods through Central Asia, establishing Almaty as a key regional hub. The opera theatre’s founding catalysed the creation of complementary institutions in the following decades: the conservatory, the philharmonic hall, the radio and several orchestras.Footnote ⁶² These shared personnel, fostering a distinct milieu of local artists and intelligentsia who cultivated an appetite for opera.Footnote ⁶³ The transformation that opera brought to the city was striking – Almaty, dismissed as a provincial backwater after the Revolution, had by the late 1930s begun to assert itself as Kazakhstan’s cultural vanguard. By the late 1930s, the theatre gradually incorporated non-Kazakh works into its repertoire, aided by the parallel formation of a Russian-language troupe. Foreign operas were occasionally translated into Kazakh and performed by local singers – a strategic move to broaden appeal, as financial sustainability demanded larger audiences. Yet by the late Soviet era, opera’s prominence waned across the USSR, Kazakhstan included. Composers shifted focus to instrumental music; the last new Kazakh opera of the Soviet period, Gaziza Zhubanova’s Kurmangazy, premiered in Almaty in 1987 – marking both an endpoint and a testament to the art form’s once-central role.

But then a new capital city project came to the rescue. Ten years after the premiere of Kurmangazy, Kazakhstan’s president ordered the relocation of the seat of government from Almaty to Astana, framing it as a strategic necessity – both symbolic and pragmatic. On one hand, the move aimed to forge a new national identity, distancing Kazakhstan from its Soviet past by creating a futuristic capital. On the other hand, it addressed pressing geopolitical anxieties, particularly fears of Russian encroachment on the northern regions as well as environmental issues: Almaty, nestled in an earthquake-prone valley, had outgrown its capacity as a capital. The government also saw the relocation as an economic catalyst, hoping to jumpstart growth after the post-Soviet stagnation of the 1990s. The transition was gradual. Though the decision to found a new capital was made in 1994, Astana was not officially inaugurated until 1998. In its early years, the city was a work in progress – infrastructure was scarce, and governmental offices operated out of repurposed dormitories and Soviet-era hotels.Footnote ⁶⁴ It took a decade, two master plans and billions in investment to transform the windswept steppe into a functional capital.Footnote ⁶⁵ Cultural institutions followed a similar trajectory. The National Symphonic Orchestra, relocated in 1999, was the first to brave the new capital. Initially housed in the former Palace of Railway Workers, musicians endured makeshift conditions while awaiting proper facilities. A year later, the Academy of Music opened its doors – a gleaming, piano-shaped landmark amid the city’s perpetual construction. Yet the institution struggled: professors lured from Almaty by promises of higher salaries found themselves teaching underqualified local students.

Once the capital was up and running – for better or worse – it was time to establish a venue worthy of high-profile performances. The government turned to Italian architect Manfredi Nicoletti for the design and commissioned the Swiss-registered Mabetex Group to bring his vision to life. The resulting complex was intended to host grand cultural spectacles – operas and ballets – but also double as a political stage for congresses and official rallies. The authorities had learned from the Almaty Opera’s example. There, the theatre stood just a stone’s throw from the governmental district, yet its prominence never eclipsed the seat of power. Nicoletti’s design, inspired by the image of ‘a flower blooming in the steppe’, balanced grandeur with deference: a soaring main hall seating 3,500 people, flanked by two smaller spaces for chamber music and conferences.Footnote ⁶⁶ While the edifice succeeded as a performance venue, it lacked rehearsal spaces, workshops, warehouses and other essential support facilities for theatrical production.

The solution came swiftly. In 2013, the government commissioned a new theatre, Astana Opera. Once again, the contract went to Mabetex Group, a company with deep ties to Kazakhstan’s political elite since Astana’s founding. Its portfolio already included the presidential palace, the international airport and the Foreign Ministry headquarters, alongside luxury sports and healthcare facilities – all projects notorious for their inflated costs compared to similar developments abroad.Footnote ⁶⁷ Astana Opera was no exception. The theatre’s exorbitant price tag, shouldered by taxpayers, was only part of the problem. Its design was a démodé pastiche of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre, lacking originality or dialogue with Astana’s futuristic skyline – or even with Manfredi Nicoletti’s existing theatre nearby. Unlike the construction of the Almaty Opera in the 1930s, which followed an open competition, the project bypassed public input entirely: no design contests, no hearings, no debate.Footnote ⁶⁸ The result was a missed opportunity – a world of contemporary opera architecture existed to inspire, yet Mabetex delivered a relic.

Opera first emerged as a Renaissance reinvention of Greek drama, and later the internal structure of many opera houses emulated the design of ancient amphitheatres. In this light, Astana Opera’s Bolshoi-inspired design might be seen as yet another revival project, not of classical ideals though, but of Soviet cultural production – itself an institutionalisation of nineteenth-century Russian imperial taste. The circular logic is telling: a newly independent nation created its capital’s image through architectural homage to its former coloniser’s most iconic theatre. Still, the building functioned. Its interiors housed the full infrastructure needed for staging, rehearsing and storing productions. Astana now boasted a classicist opera house, its faux-imperial facade projecting the ‘timeless’ cultural gravitas expected of a capital. Meanwhile, Kazakhstan’s educational backbone – Astana’s Academy of Music and regional arts schools – supplied homegrown talent, distinguishing the country from Gulf states where glittering venues outpace local artistic training.

But theatre also needs an audience. The new theatre faced dilemmas, unlike the Almaty Opera in the Soviet era. In the 1930s, the primary challenge had been introducing a new genre: building a repertoire and persuading audiences that opera was worth their time and money. In the twenty-first century, when people already know what opera is, the true difficulty lies in converting fleeting vanity visits – where the theatre serves as a backdrop for selfies – into enduring passion. The gap between casual spectators and devoted aficionados is vast: one demands spectacle, the other seeks artistic depth. Bridging it requires cultivating curiosity, education and a sense of belonging – turning a night at the opera into a lifelong habit. Without ideological imperatives – opera can no longer be distinctly ‘Soviet’, ‘realist’, or ‘national in form and socialist in content’ – Astana Opera faces the burden of self-definition. When the directives from ministries demanding ‘patriotic’, ‘revolutionary’ or ‘epic’ themes are gone, the content is being shaped by market considerations, production costs and a sense of audience demand. Astana Opera’s directors feel compelled to invite foreign stars – sometimes past their prime – to perform in the new theatre, hoping this would draw local crowds and boost its global profile. Yet far less effort went into nurturing local talent: improving musicians’ training or raising their salaries remains an afterthought.Footnote ⁶⁹

The repertoire of Astana Opera became a patchwork of Kazakh and classical European operas, predominantly works by Verdi and Puccini. Unlike the 1930s and 1940s, when Kazakh theatres actively collaborated with local composers to produce new works, Astana Opera’s strategy focused on reviving older repertoire through restaged productions. Yet these efforts failed to break meaningfully from Soviet-era conventions. While new costumes, sets and minor directorial tweaks are being introduced, the productions remain aesthetically conservative. A telling example was the 2017 staging of Kyz-Zhibek, the first Kazakh opera created in 1934, which featured live horses and camels. Rather than challenging ethnic essentialism, this adaptation reinforced it, prioritising spectacle over critical engagement. Such an approach stands in contrast to operatic trends in many theatres across the globe, where reinterpretations often prompt audiences to reconsider historical and political contexts. Even Aida, an opera ripe for postcolonial reimagining, was staged in Astana as a conventional, pompous spectacle – commercially safe but artistically uninspired. Ultimately, Astana Opera embodies a contradiction: it symbolises Kazakhstan’s ambition to project modernity – mirroring Astana’s futuristic architecture – while remaining artistically stagnant.

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This article provided an overview of the historical co-construction between opera and capital cities, as well as the legitimation that the former provides to the latter as its long-standing attribute. To do so, I first suggested looking at how the early opera emerged in the European capitals in the seventeenth century, then at how the two co-developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and finally at the arrival of opera in non-European countries – a trend that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and continues today. I also analysed, in a more detailed manner, the operatic history of Kazakhstan’s former and current capital cities to illustrate my claims about an entangled connection between the two. As I mentioned in the introduction, this research, given its timespan, does not aim to provide an exhaustive overview of the operatic history of past or present capital cities. Rather, I have highlighted and questioned how opera was appropriated for creating, maintaining and negotiating the status of capital cities, especially in non-western contexts. In doing so, I have attempted to create a research design that moves beyond the historiography of specific cities and theatres. It might allow us to rethink the existing approaches in urban and postcolonial studies that compartmentalise opera and its staging sites into isolated objects of enquiry. For while a wide consensus exists on the fact that opera has been a fundamentally urban art form, questions remain about the ways it has defined and influenced the status and trajectories of cities in which it had been produced. Hopefully, this article will give rise to further reflection on these issues.