Name: Dido and Aeneas
Start: 2026-12-13T19:00:00
Location: The Estates Theatre

Lukáš Zeman

Aco Bišćević

Eva Hartová

Michael Hofstetter

Tomáš Šelc

Arnheiður Eiríksdóttir

Lenka Pavlovič

Marie Šimůnková

Ekaterina Krovateva

Kateřina Štefková

Matěj Cibulka

Alice Nellis

Klára Lidová

Národní divadlo

It is in a way a fairy tale about monarchy in the modern world and even though it presents the major British premiers, from Winston Churchill to David Cameron, it is theatre about politicians and everyday politics and all its attendant gimmicks, juxtaposed with a certain timeless archaic principle of control over the democratic government.

The Audience

The Estates Theatre

The opera Nabucco, depicting the dramatic story of the subjugation of the Israelites by the King of Babylon, ranks among Guiseppe Verdi’s most celebrated works. Phenomenal chorus scenes, extremely impassioned virtuoso arias, as well as the perennially topical themes of expansive war, lust for power, betrayal, life and death, are the reasons why it has always been a staple of opera houses’ repertoire.

Nabucco

State Opera

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

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

National Theatre Prague

The work of Ivan Wernisch, a poet, translator, editor, journalist, pundit, mystifier, solitaire, wanderer and dreamer, viewed through the lens of his friend, director Jan Nebeský. Wernisch’s seemingly simple, yet elusive and refined verse, his secular and spiritual poetry, words masked as earthy mockery and wistful confessions of uncertainty and longing, a candid celebration of words and rhythm, new bursts of meanings, sparks of the birth and death of worlds. Beloved poems, forgotten poems, unknown texts and new works written especially for this production. And above all, a dream and word that will materialize in a magical ritual called “theatre”, as a celebration of one of the most important living Czech poets.

Wernisch

La Fabrika

Shakespeare’s immortal tragedy about the world’s injustice, the burden of an arduous mission, and human small-mindedness. A ghostly journey in search for the meaning and sense of life, a drama where the past mingles with the future, a story about the erosion of the state, society and values.

Hamlet

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

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?

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.

Tosca

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

The Tulip Fever is an adaptation of the classic comedy Spanish Brabander (Spaanschen Brabander, 1618) written by Shakespeare’s contemporary Gerbrand Breder (1585-1618), a master playwright of the Dutch Golden Age. The play describes the machinations with tulip bulbs – which in 1637 led to what is considered the first speculative bubble – set against the backdrop of the picaresque poetics of swindlers at the time. The text is skillfully interspersed with typical attributes of real capitalism: quick money, monetization of human relationships, profitable investments, madness of crowds, political scheming, and the notorious uppishness of public figures. In fact, Jerolimo orchestrates this major investment campaign, targeted on Amsterdam bourgeoisie, secretly amidst a never-ending party at Madame Beatrice’s brothel. Will the (mostly sober) people of Amsterdam see through his cynicism before it is too late? Will they come to their senses before realising that they served him not only as a joke, but also as a source of profit? And that it destroys people’s souls? Mhm?! Hardly.

Scamsterdam

A gem of Baroque music, one of the oldest still widely performed and popular operas, the first world-class English opera ... These are among the attributes of Henry Purcell’s best-known work, whose genesis is not yet clear, a work that has not survived in its entirety. The opera was probably first performed in 1689 at the dance master and choreographer Josias Priest’s boarding school for young gentlewomen in Chelsea, London. Some scholars have, however, argued that Purcell wrote the piece for the English court, either for James II or, even earlier, for Charles II. Still others claim that the opera bears within a covert allegory, veiled in a mythological story, with the witches symbolising the Catholic Church, highly unpopular in the England of the time ...