Opera came to the city in 1931, when the Dnipropetrovsk Workers' Opera House first opened its doors. For a few years it built a life of its own; the singer Arsen Arsenko performed on its stage from 1934 to 1937. Then the Second World War swept it away. As the fighting reached Ukraine, the company was evacuated far to the east, all the way to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, where the Dnieper opera was folded together with the troupe from Odesa, two displaced companies making music in exile a thousand miles from home. When the war ended, the city had no opera house of its own to return to. The stage that had briefly flourished before the war fell silent for a generation.

The revival came in 1973, when the Council of Ministers of the Ukrainian SSR approved the creation of a new Dnipropetrovsk Opera and Ballet Theatre. The building rose on the site of a park, its architects taking the Zhytomyr Music and Drama Theatre of 1966 as their model, yet giving both the exterior and the interior a character all their own. The square before it, the work of architect Pavel Nirinberg, was designed as a stage in itself, and at its center the sculptor Yuri Pavlov set the light-and-music fountain Muse. Together the theatre and its square became a gathering place as much as a venue, a piece of the city built for spectacle inside and out.

The theatre earned its standing as one of the region's cultural anchors. By the start of 2020 its repertoire had grown to a rich span of work: eighteen operas, eighteen ballets, eight operettas, and other musicals, the classics of the stage sharing the season with newer creations. The company has not been afraid of the modern, either. In 2017 the dancer and choreographer Dmytro Omelchenko won the prestigious AF Shekera Prize for staging a contemporary ballet, Carmen and Jose, a fresh telling of an old passion. From a workers' opera of the 1930s to a full academic company, the theatre carries forward a tradition of music and dance that war interrupted but could not end.