Name: Opera is Fun!
Start: 2026-12-13T11:00:00
Location: The Estates Theatre

Národní divadlo

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 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

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 Estates Theatre

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

National Theatre Prague

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

On a normal weekday, a boy comes home from school, worn out by the humdrum world of lectures, homework, and ever frowning adults that hangs over him like a heavy cloud. He cannot wait to shut the front door behind him. Who does he find at home? The only partner in folly – his grandma! Only she can overcome the adversities, save him from the jaws of deadly boredom, and dive with him into the depth of fantastic stories. Join the two irredeemable dreamers on their adventurous quest. Never settling for dullness, they are determined to repaint the mundane world with a thick layer of imagination!

The Three Musketeers and Me

For over two centuries, Gioachino Rossini has been one of the most celebrated opera composers, and it might even have been the case if he had written nothing but Il barbiere di Siviglia. Both its genesis and premiere were connected with all kinds of twists and turns, which accompany many a play and opera. The piece had to be completed hastily, rehearsed and staged even more hastily; it was a setting of a literary work that had been used several times; the premiere was poorly received and affected by scandal, etc. In hindsight and knowing the fates of other creations, such circumstances would seem to be the best prerequisite for future success. Four years after the opera’s world premiere, in 1816 at the Teatro Argentino in Rome, Il barbiere di Siviglia was first presented, in German translation, at the Estates Theatre in Prague, which in 1825 staged the piece in Czech, owing mainly to the composer and conductor František Škroup (known primarily for creating the melody of the Czech national anthem), who would later on also give Czech premieres of operas by Wagner and others. The Provisional Theatre included Il barbiere di Siviglia in its repertoire during its very first season. Later on the opera was also undertaken by the National Theatre, which to date has adapted it in more than ten productions.

Il barbiere di Siviglia

Cupid’s arrows fly around as they please, binding the seemingly incompatible and dividing the seemingly inseparable. Mozart’s philandering Count Almaviva, his neglected wife Rosina, the Countess’s pretty maid Susanna and the crafty, albeit occasionally naïve, valet Figaro know all too well … The new National Theatre production of Le nozze di Figaro has been created by two distinguished female artists: the English conductor Julia Jones and the Czech stage director Barbora Horáková Joly.

Le nozze di Figaro

Strange tidings come from the mysterious land of Illyria! Duke Orsino, a music lover, is tormented by his unrequited love for the beautiful Countess Olivia. Sadly, Olivia mourns the death of her brother and refuses to accept love from anyone until seven years have passed. Meanwhile, a merry group runs her court: the drunkard Sir Toby, Olivia’s cunning gentlewoman Maria, the irresistibly ridiculous suitor Sir Aguecheek, and the pompous puritan Malvolio, all overseen by Feste (or Clown), the witty royal jester. But one day, beautiful Viola is shipwrecked on the coast by the rough seas and starts a new life disguised as a young man named Cesario ... The plot thickens, taking unexpected twist and turns and spinning a whirlwind of misleading and mistaken identities. Yet one thing becomes clear: love knows no limits, though one can easily fall in hopeless love with the wrong person.

Twelfth Night

Philemon and Baucis, Ariadne and Theseus, Helios a Phaethon, Iphis, Amor or Marsyas... Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso compiled his unprecedented opus in the year 2 AD, where he collected the essential mythological narratives of the Ancient Greek epoch – at that time nearing its end – in a single, chronologically arranged whole. The cycle of notorious stories, from the pagan version of the Creation of the World and the ensuing Titanomachy to the account of the lives of ancient heroes, gods or demigods, which now forms the cultural and historical fundaments inherent to the Western civilization, has one remarkable common denominator: the motif of metamorphosis, or transformation. This ubiquitous principle of existence has been ingrained in humankind since the dawn of time in terms of both an infinite philosophical problem and an eternal hope. Ovid’s immortal epic poems reveals figurative yet concrete and comprehensible parable about physical and metaphysical metamorphoses – subtle or devastating, intimate or global – and invite us to consider our perception of European traditions, but also the general ways of searching for truth, whether over time or deep inside our own soul.

Metamorphoses

That which Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir or Odilon Redon meant for painting, Claude Debussy meant for music. His compositions, teeming with imagination, manifold colours and fleeting atmospheres, straddle two epochs – Romanticism and Modernism – actually co-forming the borderline itself. At the turn of the 20th century, the arts, music included, underwent ground-breaking changes, with opera being no exception. Pioneers of modern music – such as Debussy and Igor Stravinsky – assumed a rather standoffish attitude to the genre, hesitant as to how to approach the “obsolete form”. Debussy attempted to write several operas, yet only succeeded in a single case. The one and only opera he completed is the today iconic adaptation of the Belgian Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Pélleas et Mélisande. Debussy’s setting is devoid of conventional grand operatic gesture and effect, giving preference instead to an intimate music drama, with everything decisive happening “between the lines” – in allusions, silence and delicate, symbolic details.

Pelléas et Mélisande

The “voucher privatization” (post-communist distribution of vouchers to the general public to bring private capital into state-owned companies) laid the foundations for the current structure of socioeconomic and political forces in the public sphere, affected hundreds of thousands of lives, and became a cornerstone of the modern myth about regained freedom. Many personal stories about the voucher privatization involve a  fairy-tale motif “What if”: – “What life could I have if I had chosen a different investment strategy?” – “How would I live had my parents become wealthy back then?” – “What if grandpa left the hidden stock of shares?”... The concepts of voucher and general privatization reflect the global and individual histories of the Czech Republic and of each of its citizens. The stories behind voucher privatization brought about dreams and desire for freedom, naivety, and ruthless family disputes over power and property. The turbulent “tale of the new National Revival” hardly left any time for the people to concentrate on themselves, perceive themselves as living beings, sense their growth limits, and consciously embrace their mortality.

Privatization

La Fabrika

A cycle of entertainment and educational programmes for children and parents.