Estates Theatre

Prague's Estates Theatre is the one working playhouse in the world where Mozart himself conducted the first performance of an opera still in the repertoire. On 29 October 1787 he stood in its pit for the premiere of Don Giovanni, commissioned by the Prague impresario Pasquale Bondini after The Marriage of Figaro had caused a sensation in the city the winter before, and in 1791 he returned for La clemenza di Tito, composed for the festivities around Leopold II's coronation as King of Bohemia. The auditorium those evenings filled is essentially the one visitors sit in today: among the theatres of its generation in Europe it is remarkably close to its original state.

The building was the project of Count Franz Anton Nostitz-Rieneck, an Enlightenment aristocrat who wanted his city to have a grand public stage. Designed by Anton Haffenecker in a restrained Neoclassical manner, it went up in less than two years and opened in 1783 with Lessing's tragedy Emilia Galotti. Over the portal runs the motto Patriae et Musis, "to the homeland and the Muses". The building stands free on Ovocný trh, the old fruit market of the Old Town, right beside the Carolinum, the historic seat of Charles University, so that a classical theatre and a medieval college share one small square.

Its names trace the city's shifting loyalties. It opened as the Count Nostitz Theatre, became the Royal Estates Theatre when the Bohemian estates bought it in 1798, was renamed the Royal Provincial German Theatre in 1862, carried the name of the Czech dramatist Josef Kajetán Tyl from 1948 and took back the name of the estates in 1990. The German-language house also nursed Czech culture: plays in Czech were staged here from 1785, and in 1834 a song from Tyl's comedy Fidlovačka, set by František Škroup and sung by the bass Karel Strakatý, was heard here for the first time — "Kde domov můj?", later the Czech national anthem. Carl Maria von Weber directed the opera here, and Paganini and Mahler appeared on its stage.

Part of the National Theatre since the 1920s, it hosts opera, ballet and drama, with Mozart still at the core of the programme. An eight-year restoration, completed in 1990, returned the building to its historic appearance, and the auditorium with its tiers of boxes is among the best-preserved of its age. Miloš Forman filmed most of the opera scenes of Amadeus inside, so the room may look familiar even on a first visit.

Getting there

The theatre stands at Ovocný trh 1 in Prague's Old Town, a few minutes' walk from Old Town Square and Wenceslas Square. The nearest metro station is Můstek (lines A and B). Václav Havel Airport Prague (PRG) is about 12 km away, connected to the city by bus and road.