Estates Theatre

What you see

A pale green and white neoclassical theatre with a columned portico, standing free on all sides — unusually for Prague, you can walk right round it.

The story

The Estates Theatre is the place where Mozart's operas found their most devoted audience, and it is the only theatre still standing where Mozart himself worked. It was built in the early 1780s as an act of Enlightenment generosity by Count František Antonín Nostitz-Rieneck, who wanted a stage for the public. The count's plan was sketched by Count Kašpar Heřman Künigl, and the building was designed and built in only two years by the court builder Anton Haffenecker, as one of the first neoclassical public buildings in Prague.

It opened on the twenty-first of April 1783 with Lessing's tragedy Emilia Galotti, and it held a thousand spectators. A story says the count also had a miniature copy of the theatre built at his summer residence and meant to link the two with an underground passage. At first it showed German drama and Italian opera, but Czech was soon heard.

On the twentieth of January 1785 a Czech translation of a comedy was performed, effectively the first professional play in Czech in Prague. Mozart came to Prague in January 1787. Vienna had given his opera The Marriage of Figaro a lukewarm reception, but Prague loved it, and on the twentieth of January he conducted a concert here himself.

The enthusiasm of the Praguers was so great that he was moved to compose a new opera for the city. It was Don Giovanni, and on the twenty-ninth of October 1787 Mozart conducted its premiere in this theatre. The story that he wrote the overture the night before is a popular tale, not confirmed, and the famous line attributed to him, My Praguers understand me, is hard to verify, though his letter praising Prague's love of Figaro is documented.

In 1791 his opera La clemenza di Tito had its premiere here, in honour of the coronation of Emperor Leopold the Second as king of Bohemia, though it never reached the success of the earlier operas. The theatre then changed hands. In 1799 the Bohemian Estates bought it from the count and renamed it the Estates Theatre.

From 1824 regular Czech performances began, and on the second of February 1826 the first Czech opera, The Tinker by František Škroup, had its premiere here, and Škroup, who became second conductor in 1827, also brought several Wagner operas to Prague. In 1862 it became the Royal German Land Theatre with a German company, and on the sixteenth of November 1920 a Czech crowd occupied it during anti-German disturbances. Most buildings seized in those riots were returned to the Germans, but this one was not, and on the first of December 1920 it was handed to the National Theatre.

Under Communism, from 1949, it was called the Tyl Theatre, after the playwright of the Czech national anthem, and it regained its old name later. The building has been altered many times. A great rebuilding in September and October 1834 added a storey to the auditorium, a second gallery and a big chandelier on a chain that could be lowered to light and snuff the candles.

The biggest renovation, in 1859, was done conservatively, and it improved acoustics and fire safety. In 1882 the architect Achille Wolf extended the building into Fruit Market, and in 1890 to 1892 electric lighting and iron galleries and outside stairs were added. The last great reconstruction was from 1983 to 1991, when an underground level was added, together with a modern revolving stage, and the interior colours changed from white, gold and red to white, gold and blue.

Before that happened, the director Miloš Forman managed to shoot many scenes of his film Amadeus here, in the real room. The two most important boxes are the imperial one, directly opposite the stage, and the presidential one on the right, which cannot be bought because it is always reserved for the president and his guests. Today the Estates Theatre is a stage of the National Theatre.

Besides drama, the National Theatre's opera performs here, mostly the Mozart repertoire. The building is connected by an underground passage to the Kolowrat Palace next door, where the chamber stage of the National Theatre is housed. It has about six hundred and fifty-nine seats, and sitting in them you are in the same room where, in 1787, a composer stood up with a baton and conducted the first performance of one of the greatest operas ever written.