State Opera Prague

Listen for a moment. Behind you, traffic rolls along the wide highway that cuts through this part of Prague. In front of you, a pale stone facade rises with columns, a triangular pediment and carved figures. The noise of the road and the calm of the theatre sit side by side here. It is a strange meeting, and it is part of this building's story. You are standing at the State Opera, one of the great nineteenth-century theatres of Central Europe.

To understand why this theatre exists, you need to know one thing about Prague in the late nineteenth century. The city had two communities living side by side. One spoke Czech. The other spoke German. Both had money, pride and strong ideas about culture. In the 1880s the Czech community opened its National Theatre on the river embankment. It was a powerful national symbol. The German-speaking community answered with a theatre of its own.

That answer is the building in front of you. It opened in January 1888 as the New German Theatre. A private theatre association of German-speaking Praguers raised the money and organised the project. They wanted a stage large enough for grand opera, and they wanted it quickly. The theatre was planned, built and opened in a short span of years. It was a cultural statement as much as a place to hear music.

The design came from the Viennese partnership of Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer. Their names may mean little to you now, but you have probably seen their work. This pair designed dozens of theatres across the old Habsburg lands and beyond. Their buildings stand in Vienna, Zagreb, Odesa and many other cities. They worked almost like a factory of theatres, with tested plans that put audiences close to the stage and helped them leave safely in a fire.

That last point mattered greatly. Theatres in this era were lit by flame, then by early electricity, and fires were common and deadly. Fellner and Helmer became known for wide corridors, many exits and careful planning of staircases. So when you walk through the foyers, notice how easily people move. The elegance you see has a practical purpose. Beauty and safety were designed together here.

Now look at the facade itself. The style is neoclassical, which means it borrows from the temples of ancient Greece and Rome. You can see this in the columned portico and the pediment above it, filled with sculpture. Inside, the mood changes. The auditorium leans toward the playful Rococo style of the eighteenth century, with curving balconies, gilded ornament and soft red tones. A sober Greek face outside, a warm and festive room inside.

The first great director of the theatre was Angelo Neumann. He was famous in the opera world as a champion of Richard Wagner. Fittingly, the theatre opened with a Wagner opera. Under Neumann, the New German Theatre became a serious house with ambitious productions. Singers and conductors who later became famous passed through its rehearsal rooms. For a time, this stage was among the most important German-language opera houses outside Germany and Austria.

In the early twentieth century, the composer and conductor Alexander Zemlinsky led the music here for many years. He was a Viennese musician, a teacher of Arnold Schoenberg and a gifted interpreter of new music. Under his direction, audiences in this auditorium heard modern works alongside the classics. This is a surprise to many visitors. They expect an old-fashioned house, but this theatre once stood close to the cutting edge of European music.

Then history turned hard. The Second World War and its aftermath ended the old German-speaking community of Prague. After 1945 the theatre took on a new identity. For several decades it carried the name of the Smetana Theatre, after Bedřich Smetana, the composer often called the father of Czech music. A building made as a German answer to Czech culture now honoured a Czech national hero. Few places in the city show that reversal so clearly.

In the 1970s came the highway behind you. Planners built a major traffic artery through the heart of the new town, right past the theatre and the National Museum next door. It cut the building off from much of the city around it. Many Praguers still regret that decision. As you stand here, notice how the theatre seems to sit on a small island between roads, a grand house that lost its quiet street.

After the political changes of 1989, the theatre gained the name it carries today, the State Opera. Later it joined the National Theatre organisation, so the two houses that began as rivals now share one administration. In the late 2010s the building closed for a long and careful renovation. Craftspeople cleaned, repaired and restored the interiors. When it reopened in early 2020, many visitors were surprised by how bright and fresh the colours looked.

If you go inside for a performance, take your time before the music starts. Walk the foyers slowly. Look up at the ceilings, the painted panels and the chandeliers. Then step into the auditorium and look at the curve of the balconies from your seat. The horseshoe shape lets most of the audience see each other as well as the stage. In the nineteenth century, being seen was half the reason to come.

When the lights go down, this room does what Fellner and Helmer built it to do. The noise of the highway disappears. The stone walls and the closed doors hold the city outside. For a few hours, you sit in the same kind of space that Prague audiences filled in 1888, listening to voices with no microphones at all.

Before you leave, turn once more toward the facade. Notice the light on the pale stone and the dark shapes of the sculpture against the sky. Then look past it to the dome of the National Museum on the hill nearby. Two proud buildings, two languages, one city. As you walk on toward Wenceslas Square, listen again to the traffic, and remember the quiet room behind those doors.