The theatre exists because one man noticed an absence. Ramón J. Cárcano, the provincial justice minister, was struck that his native Córdoba had no concert hall, and in 1887 he proposed building one to Governor Ambrosio Olmos. With the legislature's approval and funding secured, Cárcano turned to a fellow Italian Argentine: Francesco Tamburini, born in Ascoli Piceno in 1846, who had arrived in Argentina in 1881 and risen to Inspector General of National Architecture. Tamburini gave Córdoba an eclectic Italianate design, its façade crowned by a quadriga - the four-horse chariot of classical triumph - and softened with verdigris accents and sculptural reliefs by Arturo Nembrini Gonzaga, the Beaux-Arts vocabulary that wealthy Argentina craved. Tamburini was simultaneously designing the Teatro Colón and enlarging the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires. He would die in 1891 with the Colón still unbuilt - it was finished only in 1908, by other hands. Córdoba's house opened first, and outlived its maker.

Inaugurated on April 26, 1891, the theatre first bore the name Rivera Indarte and was built for a thousand spectators. Locals called it the Teatro de la Calle Ancha - the Broad Street Theatre - after the avenue out front, later renamed for the jurist Vélez Sársfield. Its cleverest feature is hidden underfoot: the auditorium floor can be raised to stage level, transforming the hall from a place to watch performances into a vast ballroom for the social galas that have filled it for well over a century. A theatre that can flatten its own seats is a theatre confident it will be the center of the city's social life - and this one was right.

The roll of performers reads like a survey of a golden age. The actress and director María Guerrero brought the great drama of Spain to its stage after 1897. The tenor Enrico Caruso sang here, as did the baritone Titta Ruffo and the lyric tenor Tito Schipa. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein played its hall. For a provincial city far from the European capitals, drawing artists of that rank was no small thing - it announced that Córdoba intended to be taken seriously as a place of culture. Smaller rooms, the Luis de Tejeda and Rafael Grisolía halls, host seminars and the theatre's own Youth Orchestra, and a 1970 museum gathered the institution's deep collection of stagecraft.

Few buildings have worn Argentina's political turbulence so plainly. In 1950, President Juan Perón renamed the theatre for General José de San Martín, the liberator, marking the centennial of San Martín's death. After Perón was overthrown in 1956, the theatre reverted to Rivera Indarte. In 1973 it regained the San Martín name once more, which it keeps today - the Teatro del Libertador General San Martín. The shifting marquee is a small map of a turbulent century, each change of name a change of regime. Through all of it the work went on the same. The curtain rose, the imported European machinery turned, and the voices carried out over what was once Broad Street into the Córdoba night, as they still do.