Mozart’s illustrious operatic oeuvre is rounded off by a work providing both copious entertainment and food for thought, affording a fantastic spectacle and presenting a magical ritual of initiation of the human spirit. All that is encompassed in Die Zauberflöte, and all that can be found in Vladimír Morávek’s colourful production, featuring a thrilling atmosphere and teeming with mysterious symbols. There is something for everyone – adults and children, including, if fear hasn’t consumed them, the very youngest.

Die Zauberflöte

The Estates Theatre

Smetana and the librettist Karel Sabina masterfully mocked all those who expected the “national opera” to be an idyllic picture of the Czech countryside, with its inhabitants being virtuous and governed by high morals. The Bartered Bride is thus far more humorous than “national”. Nonetheless, its humour is precisely of the type Czechs so love, and hence Smetana’s opera, abounding in irony, scathing, occasionally even cynical, wit, as well as tenderness and simple joie de vivre, has ultimately become “national” in the best sense of the word ...

The Bartered Bride

National Theatre

The fruit of the collaboration between the two great creators, Antonín Dvořák and Jaroslav Kvapil, who were close as artists and friends alike, was a magical, dreamy story of the great, unfulfilled desire of the water nymph Rusalka, a work in which Dvořák’s musical genius reached its apex. The fairy-tale atmosphere inspired the composer to create singular, impressionistic music replete with melodic imagination and masterful instrumentation, a suggestive expression of the play of waves and the reflection of moonlight on the surface of a lake, as well as the overwhelming magic of a fairy-tale dream.

Rusalka

State Opera

Antonín Dvořák’s two most successful operas, The Devil and Kate, and Rusalka, are based on fairy-tale motifs. Blending folk and humorous with lyrical and fantasy elements is one of the typical (and still very popular) traits of Czech drama. Dvořák created a masterly patchwork of contrasting scenes – folksy, breezy, fiendishly fervent and courtly noble.

The Devil and Kate

National Theatre Prague

The powerful story of The Dogheads, one of Alois Jirásek’s most celebrated works, seems destined for the operatic stage. In 1897, the experienced composer and conductor Karel Kovařovic took on the challenge and created an opera that triumphed in the competition for a new Czech opera, surpassing Fibich and Foerster. Soon after, The Dogheads spread to opera houses across the Czech lands and won the hearts of a wide audience.

The Dogheads

Theater of JK Tyl New Stage

Composed by one of the major figures of 20th-century musical theatre – the creator of 16 musicals and hundreds of songs, who launched his career writing the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story – it is an iconic work of its genre. SWEENEY TODD: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a riveting synthesis of dark humour, horror and melodrama, imbued with brilliant musical irony.

SWEENEY TODD: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

The Secret is Bedřich Smetana’s seventh, and penultimate, opera. It is also the second fruit of the composer’s collaboration with the librettist Eliška Krásnohorská. Completed in May1878, the piece received its premiere the on 18 September at the New Czech Theatre in Prague. The National Theatre first staged the opera on 12 May 1885, on the first anniversary of Smetana’s death. Yet it only attained wide popularity after the post of the opera company’s director had been assumed by the conductor Karel Kovařovic, who was fully aware of the qualities of the mature Smetana work. Krásnohorská furnished Smetana with an exquisite libretto, whose themes may bring to mind William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or the Czech author Ladislav Stroupežnický’s play Our Uppish and Defiant Fellows, dating from a later time.

The Secret

Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel is one of the most frequently performed operas in Germany. Inspired by the Grimm brothers’ popular fairy tale, the libretto was written by the composer’s sister Adelheid Wette, who modified the rather macabre story, adding the characters of the Sandman and the Dew Fairy, as well as the instrumental dream pantomime scene in the forest, and concluding it with the resurrection of the witch’s victims and the happy reunion between the children and their parents. With the music written in the grand Wagnerian romantic style, Humperdinck’s opera also contains folk rhythms, songs for children and old melodies. The world premiere, in Weimar on 23 December 1893, was conducted by Richard Strauss, totally enraptured by the piece. Enraptured too was the audience, and Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel has ever since remained extremely popular in Germany, where every December it has been performed at more than 35 opera houses. In 1905, the piece was first shown at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where it has often been staged during Christmas.

Hänsel und Gretel

A party is thrown to celebrate the birthday of the 18-year-old Crown Princess. A Sultan has sent her a dwarf as a present – a creature endowed with a sensitive heart, yet doomed to nothing but providing entertainment. Never having seen his image in a mirror, the dwarf is not aware of his physical deformity and inhabits the illusory world of innocent self-confidence. Infatuated by the Infanta’s beauty, he falls in love with her and naively dreams of becoming her brave champion. The girl, however, merely only toys with the dwarf and gifts him a white rose – a symbol of purity and false hope. When the dwarf gets to see his reflection in a mirror for the first time, he is appalled, whereupon his delusional universe comes tumbling down. Heartbroken and clutching the white rose, he dies, while the Infanta’s party continues  indifferently. The story lays bare the cruelty of the world of power and beauty, and the tragic discrepancy between the inner human value and outer semblance.

Jiří Hájek

Events

Upcoming events

Aug 26, 2026 - Feb 14, 2027

Die Zauberflöte · Národní divadlo

Aug 27, 2026 - Jun 27, 2027

The Bartered Bride · Národní divadlo

Sep 1 - Dec 11, 2026

Rusalka · Národní divadlo

Sep 3, 2026 - Mar 21, 2027

The Devil and Kate · Národní divadlo

24 - 25 Sep, 2026

The Dogheads · J.K. Tyl Theatre

Future and recently performed repertoire

Krušina / Indian in The Bartered Bride by Smetana

Národní divadlo

Gamekeeper in Rusalka by Dvořák

Národní divadlo

Papageno in Die Zauberflöte by Mozart

Národní divadlo

Sweeney Todd in Sweeney Todd by Sondheim

Národní divadlo

Don Estoban in The Dwarf by Zemlinsky

Národní divadlo

Papa in Hänsel und Gretel by Humperdinck

Národní divadlo

Master bricklayer in The Secret by Smetana

Národní divadlo

Jiskra Řehůřek, dudák in The Dogheads by Kovařovic

J.K. Tyl Theatre

Devil porter / Steward in The Devil and Kate by Dvořák

Národní divadlo

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