Name: Minioperas (Mozart)
Start: 2026-09-05T16:00:00
Location: The Estates Theatre

Ondřej Scholtz

Jiřina Marková Krystlíková

Josef Kotěšovský

Jiří Votruba

Michaela Vernerová

Národní divadlo

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

And if we were to name the places at which Mozart in person premiered an opera of his and which still function as theatres, the one and only candidate in the world would be the Estates Theatre in Prague. The National Theatre Opera has proudly cherished this unique tradition for decades.

Don Giovanni

The book, featuring symbolism bound with nature, everyday rural life and tradition, comprises passionate and erotic tales teeming with supernatural beings and macabre phantoms. The Wedding Shirts, The Water Goblin and The Noonday Witch, magical myths of love and spine-chilling fables, was adapted for the stage of the National Theatre historical building by the SKUTR creative tandem of stage directors Martin Kukučka and Lukáš Trpišovský. The two artists have a penchant for the subjects treated by Erben – ritualised archetypal themes, such as love and death, the relationships between the mother and the child, man and woman, humans and nature, have appeared in their productions in a myriad of forms and contexts.

A Bouquet

National Theatre Prague

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

Naive Ema is dying to experience the exciting life and eternal love she only knowns from romance novels. But her dreams and rosy visions clash with the boring reality of her marriage to a prudent and caring country doctor. Ordinariness and banality suffocate her, random love encounters bring temporary excitement but cannot satisfy her fantasies. She is constantly haunted by the desire for all that’s new, better, and greater, but the glittering ideal world that lures her eventually brings her down in the crash with the ruthless reality. Permanent dissatisfaction and desire for a better life that seems at hand and purchasable on credit is a trap into which we are still falling after more than one hundred and fifty years.

Madame Bovary

The ballet adaptation of Abbé Prévost’s novel L’Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut shows Sir Kenneth MacMillan at his very finest, attesting as it does to his profound insight into human psychology, choreographic craft and narrative skill. The artist admirably expresses the power of fateful love in the central characters’ impassioned duets.

L'Histoire de Manon

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

Carmen is actually one of the first verismo operas that preceded the “manifesto” of the Italian artistic movement. Its style, and the death of the title heroine, which were at variance with the established opéra comique conventions, seem to have been the reason why the work did not give rise to much public enthusiasm at and in the wake of the world premiere in Paris in 1875. Yet Carmen soon triumphed in other European cities.

Carmen

In 75 letters, the two main protagonists, the cruel Marquise de Merteuil and the cynical Vicomte de Valmont – tough players, rivals and partners – unfurl a dangerous game with the feelings of their victims, abounding in malicious emotional manipulation and brazen seduction within the web of a variable love polygon. The roles in the “dangerous game of the dangerous liaisons” are played by humiliation resulting from being spurned and desire for revenge, as well as longing for achieving satisfaction from having control over the fate of another person and steering the others’ feelings and passions. Yet not even masters of calculated strategy can be safe against the natural power of love that is capable of both saving and destroying everything …

Dangerous Liaisons

Minioperas (Mozart)

In the near future, somewhere in the middle of Europe, there is a land where not only lies, but all things imagined are forbidden under strict penalty, including fables and imagination. Because they challenge the given, measurable facts verifiable by reason, undermine the ruling power and, in an apparent paradox, point too clearly to the very essence of things, the truth. Such audacity must be punished.

Baron Münchhausen

An awkward and somewhat unhappy churchwarden quits his job at a big city church to find a new life in a remote mountain village. By a tragicomic coincidence, he is considered the new parish priest whom the forlorn community desperately searches for and needs. Having tried in vain to explain and escape the part in a ‘miracle’, the churchwarden eventually accepts the role of the accidental saviour. His unorthodox ways and understanding for all human sins and weaknesses capture the hearts of the peculiar villagers. However, he clashes with the local teacher, who used to be the local celebrity and authority and who promotes ‘non-spiritual’ education. The faith of a man who has humbly assumed the desired task thus stands in juxtaposition to the self-confident ‘common sense’. But what if not everything is as it seems?