I was getting ready for the Tbilisi Opera opening season this year with exactly the same enthusiasm I had when, at the age of thirteen in 1955, my mom prepared me for the first night of Abesalom & Eteri. Emotion-wise, it seems not much has changed over the last seventy years.
It was Sakartvelo’s golden tenor, Teimuraz Gugushvili, who on the 14th of September 2025 sang Abesalom to open the 174th season at our beloved Opera and Ballet State Theatre. This marked his personal 48th season opening. The undying Georgian musical genius of Zacharia Paliashvili continues to attract opera buffs without fail—which is quite understandable. His operas are already in our blood, not just in our minds.
What amazes me most of all is Gugushvili himself, who will soon be 75. His remarkably youthful tenor never fades. In fact, he sounds even better now than he did a quarter of a century ago, when he was only fifty. The maturation of his voice and singing style is an ongoing process.
I often wonder if there’s some secret behind his charming voice. Frankly, I spoke to him barely a month ago, hoping to learn the answer. But what I heard from him was this: he has never done anything unusual for his voice—no special care, no uncommon exercises, no outlandish training methods, no tricks to preserve or maintain his vocal excellence in perfect shape.
Temur Gugushvili is just a regular good guy—eating, drinking, behaving, and enjoying life as we all do. Together with his wonderful wife, Lamara Gloveli, he has raised a delightful family. He is simply natural—born that way—with a silver spoon and a golden voice in his mouth.
When the curtain rose, my heart started beating faster—the same overture, the same stage, the same breath of the audience! I felt thrown back to my teenage level of emotionality. But Gugushvili’s electrifying voice, introduced at that sacred moment in the most masterful manner, brought me back to my grown-up senses.
He held up the entire opera extremely well—with dignity, vigor, and musical aptitude—keeping his mesmerizing tenor astonishingly free and expressive, yet in tight harmony with Paliashvili’s rhythm and tune. Unbelievable!
I wished the entire country could have been compressed into that small theater—briefly called the Opera House—at that thrilling moment, so we could all listen together to our genuinely national voice. It was a voice very different from what our tired and overstrained public is usually compelled to hear in the streets or through our multitude of mass communication channels.
The nation has poured its love for Teimuraz (Temur) Gugushvili into a beautiful publication containing his biography and warm letters of appreciation from dozens of prominent public figures. The grateful Georgian society has also unveiled his star in front of his beloved Opera Theater, where he has performed for almost half a century—never once straying from his dramatic operatic style, always using a full, rich, and broad tone and smooth musical phrasing. A superb piece of genuine bel canto.
Teimuraz Gugushvili—the People’s Artist of Georgia, winner of the State, Paliashvili, and Anjaparidze prizes, principal soloist of the Tbilisi Opera, head of the solo singing chair at the Tbilisi State Conservatory, professor, and Knight of the Order of Honor—wherever he goes and sings, demonstrates a surprising habit of forgetting all these honors and regalia. He becomes simply a lovely, good-natured man of his years: a dedicated friend, caring husband, loving dad, beloved grandpa, and helpful neighbor.
His most recent performance, just the other day, played to a full house and was met with a long, standing ovation—several curtain calls, a truckload of flowers, vigorous applause, and the warmest possible reception.
On the other hand, you can’t surprise Temur Gugushvili with stage success of that caliber. In nearly fifty years on stage, he has sung and performed in more than three thousand productions, both in Sakartvelo and abroad—in Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, England, Germany, France, Spain, America, and many others, not to mention every capital city of the former Soviet republics.
The Italian school of singing, through which he trained, has had a special effect on his career, enabling him to successfully perform nearly every classical operatic tenor role.
No surprise, then, that the public wants to keep him on stage forever. And he just might!
BLOG by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
