Name: Pozemský prach a Boží dech
Start: 2026-11-02T19:00:00
Location: State Opera

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

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?

End of a Priest

National Theatre Prague

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

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

State Opera

Imagine four enthusiasts who have decided to start a motion capture studio. A brilliant idea? Could be, but for a little catch: filmmaking is all Greek to them.

Pluto

La Fabrika

Hedda, the proud daughter of General Gabler, loves horse riding, playing the piano, and pistol shooting. To everyone’s surprise, the reserved, steely-eyed beauty marries the aspiring historian and soon-to-be professor Jörgen Tesman; returning from a long honeymoon, the couple move into a mansion fully satisfying Hedda’s wishes. Yet the ghosts of the past come forth. Tea Elvsted, a mutual acquaintance, comes to the town, joined by Eilert Løvborg, Tesman’s more handsome and talented rival and Hedda’s old flame. Back then, the demons of alcohol and drugs had destroyed Løvborg’s brilliant intellect, and his dubious reputation made him an unsuitable match for Hedda, both financially and socially. However, Løvborg has overcome his addictions with the loving care of Tea and even has a new book published. As Tesman’s prospects of the professorship seems uncertain and Hedda watches her dream life crumble, darkness, anger, and harshness take over her and she is ready to reckon with the world and those around her.

Hedda Gabler

Mary W. Shelley wrote her first and most famous novel in 1818. Though it has turned a literary classic, it is mostly known from pop culture references, film adaptations, and variations emphasizing the image of a horrific monster stitched together from various body parts by the insane professor Frankenstein. The (in)human creature secretly brought to life in the ambitious scientist’s laboratory has no name in Mary Shelley’s iconic horror novel. The creator dismisses his creation upon its ‘birth’ as a failed experiment, throwing it on a solitary desperate journey where the only thing it longs for is a compassion.

Frankenstein

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

Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet (1966) is Balanchine’s very first abstract work. The choreographer used to say that chamber music was not suitable for large-scale ballets, since chamber pieces are usually “too long, with too many repeats, and are meant for small rooms”. Back in the 1930s, Arnold Schoenberg orchestrated Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, voicing similar dissatisfaction. In a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle music critic Alfred Frankenstein, he explained the reasons for having done so: “1. I like the piece. 2. It is seldom played. 3. It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.” Balanchine opted for Schoenberg’s version. His Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet is a dynamic one-act ballet for 55 dancers in four parts (in line with the four movements of Brahms’s quartet), each possessing a particular mood, style and charge.

Who cares?

Pozemský prach a Boží dech

The singer Floria Tosca, who is even invited to the royal court, and the painter Mario Cavaradossi are respected and adored artists, yet their standing does not safeguard them against the malicious police chief Baron Scarpia. Cavaradossi dies not only because he, a Voltairean, tries to save the life of Cesare Angelotti, the former Consul of the Roman Republic, but also for being Tosca’s lover, Scarpia’s rival. Giacomo Puccini had mulled over Victorien Sardou’s La Tosca ever since 1889, when he saw in Milan a performance of the drama, starring the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhardt.