The Conservatoire is the oldest educational institution for the performing arts in modern Greece, founded by a non-profit Music and Drama Association, and from the beginning it cast an outsized shadow. Among those who studied here was Maria Callas, who trained at the Conservatoire in the late 1930s before becoming the defining opera voice of the twentieth century. The conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos passed through as a young man, as did the composer Nikos Skalkottas and the pianist Gina Bachauer. Its teachers were figures of real weight, among them Callas's own celebrated mentor, Elvira de Hidalgo. The corridors of an Athens music school turn out to be one of the quiet starting points of modern classical performance.

The institution was not afraid of a quarrel. In 1881, a new German-trained director named Georgios Nazos arrived and did something controversial: he dragged the curriculum into the modern Western European world, introducing the full range of instruments and theory the founders had resisted. The pure Apollonian-Dionysian vision gave way to symphonies and concertos. It was the kind of argument every conservatory eventually has, tradition against the wider world, and Nazos's victory is the reason the school could later produce performers who took the international stage rather than a purely local one.

The same year it was founded, 1871, the Conservatoire also opened the first drama school in Greece on its premises. Its teaching staff over the years read like a history of the Greek stage: Aimilios Veakis, Dimitris Rontiris, and other names that shaped how a nation learned to act. So the building was never only about sound. It was where modern Greece taught itself to perform, in song and in speech alike, an entire culture's performing arts incubated under one roof and one institutional name.

The Conservatoire's home is a masterpiece that was never finished. It was designed by Ioannis Despotopoulos, known as Jan Despo, the only Greek architect to have studied under Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus. In 1959 the government commissioned him to design an entire Athens Cultural Center, a sweeping modernist complex spanning nearly 150,000 square meters: an 1,800-seat opera house, a new Byzantine museum, theaters, a hall for the state orchestra, all laid out near the National Gallery. He won the top architectural prize of his era for it. Then the money ran out. Construction began in 1969 and the Conservatoire building was completed around 1980, but of that grand vision, only one piece was ever built. The Conservatoire is the surviving fragment of a dream too large for its moment.

What was built is severe and beautiful, a 13,000-square-meter slab of clean Bauhaus geometry, its facade running 160 meters. For decades parts of it sat sealed and unused. Then, beginning around 2013, the building came back to life. A long-locked basement space was refurbished in 2016 and reopened to the public. In 2017 the Conservatoire became one of the main venues of documenta 14, the great German art exhibition that, for the first time, came to Athens, and its underground amphitheatre, designed in the spirit of the ancient Greek theatres, hosted a haunting sound installation by the Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh. A building conceived to honor classical performance had circled all the way back, becoming a stage for art again.