Turkish State Opera and Ballet

The State Opera and Ballet (Turkish: Devlet Opera ve Balesi) is the national directorate of opera and ballet companies of Turkey, with venues in Ankara, İstanbul, İzmir, Mersin, Antalya and Samsun. The directorate is bound to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

The first opera staged during the Ottoman period is usually attributed to the reign of Selim III (1761–1808), when Selim, himself a composer and a poet, invited a foreign company to stage an opera at the Topkapı Palace in 1797.

In 1840, Gaetano Donizetti's Belisario became the first opera to be translated into Turkish, and was performed at the newly built theatre by Italian architect Bosco. The theater was transferred to Tütüncüoğlu Michael Naum Efendi in 1844, who continued to arrange opera performances for the following 26 years. An important public opera performance was Giuseppe Verdi's Ernani, staged by an Italian company in Beyoğlu in 1846. Also in 1846, Naum Efendi's theatre was destroyed by fire and was replaced by a new one. During the period of 1846–1877, operas of Verdi, performed mostly by Italian companies, reached a wide audience. One of the earliest Turkish operettas was Leblebici Horhor (Horhor the chick pea seller), by the Armenian composer Dikran Çuhacıyan who is also remembered as the composer of what may have been the first original opera in Turkish, Arif'in Hilesi (Arif's Deception) 1874.

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