The Prague Summer Nights Young Artists Music Festival presents a fully staged production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte at the historic Estates Theatre. Sung in German with Czech and English surtitles, this magical opera journey follows Prince Tamino, Pamina, and Papageno through a world of mystery, trial, wisdom, and wonder. Conducted by Sahar Nouri and directed by Garnett Bruce, the production features the young artists of Prague Summer Nights and the PSN Orchestra in one of Mozart’s most beloved and imaginative theatrical works.

The Magic Flute / Die Zauberflöte (Prague Summer Nights)

The Estates Theatre

The Prague Summer Nights Young Artists Music Festival presents a fully staged production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni at the historic Estates Theatre. Sung in Italian with Czech and English surtitles, this powerful masterpiece of seduction, wit, and reckoning returns to the very theatre where it received its world premiere in 1787 under Mozart’s own direction. This 2026 production is conducted by John Nardolillo and directed by Joachim Schamberger, and features the talented young artists of Prague Summer Nights and the PSN Orchestra.

Don Giovanni (Prague Summer Nights)

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

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

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

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

Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata, to the libretto based on Alexandre Dumas’s novel La Dame aux camélias, about Marie Duplessis, the famous courtesan and idol of Parisian society in the 1840s, is actually the very first major opera treating a contemporary social theme. The work’s premiere in 1863 in Venice was a flop: the audience was appalled that the lead role had been assigned to a courtesan who, what’s more, was portrayed in a positive light. Yet Verdi’s opera soon started garnering plaudits and is now one of the most popular repertoire titles the world over.

La traviata

State Opera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

End of a Priest

They are virtually invisible and nameless, yet those in powerful fear them. The inconspicuous heroes who have dared to confront tyrannical regimes and make their voices heard. While they are unlikely to make it to a magazine cover, their stories of courage and determination spread uncontrollably, as modern fables secretly whispered in people’s kitchens and living rooms. Their stories give others hope that the world might become a better place, even if just a little bit. They shed rays of light into absolute darkness. Ever more such women writers, journalists, students, artists, workers, and others raise across totalitarian states.

Perpetuum Havel

Palac Akropolis

The first has been conceived by Robert Bondara, a Polish choreographer, stage director and teacher, formerly a dancer with the Polish National Ballet and since 2018 director of the Poznan Grand Theatre Ballet.

Avant-Garde

Thomas S. Eliot wrote his poem – an opus magnum of the 20th century – as a reflection of the horrors of WWI and situated it in a landscape woven from the historical consciousness of humanity and voices of European literature. Through this open barren land, where town meets sea and desert and the state has collapsed, rambles don Quixote, the wandering knight who upholds the values of chivalry and never loses his faith in the power of love. Is he obsolete, foolish? While don Quixote’s acts are incomprehensible by reason, our hearts root for him. The production searches for the fundamental values in a country swept by the war. It is also a tribute to the naive adoration of Dulcinea del Toboso and to the thousands of heroes conceived by human imagination, the great spirits shining as a still point of the turning world.

Don Quixote. The Waste Land

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

Bílá Voda, or White Water, a remote village hidden in the mountains... Two young girls consecrated to God – Tobie and Evarista – arrive in the village the last September night of 1950, when the communist regime interned all Czechoslovak nuns in concentration convents. They are forced to labour in the local factory together with all other nuns. Tobie is crippled forever by the hard work, while Evarista has her vow of chastity forcibly broken and suffers humiliation in a communist prison. Yet the wardens cannot deprive her of her faith and loyalty to the order. Can a nun rebel against the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, stand against the regime and the collaborating church? The hardest battle must be fought within one’s own soul...

Bílá Voda (White Water)

Once upon a time, there were three Princesses, who did not intend to play second fiddle in a first-class fairy tale. And so after their royal parents went on holiday and a wicked sorcerer abducted their brother, Prince Jan, they wasted no time in setting out into the world to seek him. During their adventurous journey, they win the love of the masters of the Sun, the Moon and the Wind, who decide to help them. But will the Princesses succeed in thwarting the warlock Triglav’s plans, setting free the enchanted Morning Star and restoring order in the universe?

The Sun, the Moon and the Wind

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

What can one do where apparently nothing can be done? In his iconic essay The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel asks whether the only possibility for the powerless is accepting the external circumstances and succumbing to inner resignation; he contemplated the question in the 1970s, while subjected to harsh communist oppression.

The Power of the Powerless

Prague Crossroads (St. Anne's Church)

An impoverished circus director picks up a rose in an enchanted garden belonging to a terrible Beast. The Beast gets angry and threatens to kill the trespasser – unless one of his daughters pays for the father’s sins. When the youngest daughter, the Beauty, decides to sacrifice herself, she cannot imagine the consequences of her actions.

The Beauty and the Beast

What do we really have in our hands? Whether tender in a loving embrace, skilful in planting of flowers or strong in a gesture of power, it is the hands that transform human thoughts into actions and ideas into works of art. In our fingertips and palms we thus hold the power to affect and change the state of affairs, our surroundings, and even the world. Yet, what form do we actually shape the world into? In Our Hands is an accolade to non-verbal communication as the key to understanding the world and ourselves. The dynamic fusion of physical theatre, acrobatics, parkour, and live music invites the audience on a journey where each and every gesture becomes a message and an instigation to take a fresh look at what we really have in our hands.

In Our Hands

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

“He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower—is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention.”

We are in 2034. Russia has occupied Ukraine and the Baltic States. Hungarians and Slovaks have left the EU and voluntarily acceded to the Russian Federation. The Czechs and the Poles are the only Central-European nations left to stand for European values. The West sees the two brave nations as a wall protecting European civilisation from collapse. The French write philosophical treatises about us, the Germans keep their fingers crossed, and the Americans send us military aid. Everyone is well aware that the Poles and the Czechs must stick together. Facing the imminent disintegration of the fractured EU, an idea arises to sign a Union Treaty that would unify the two nations. Time is pressing as the Russians are threatening to start a war, and someone must come up with a narrative that will support the historical ties between Poland and Czechia and prove that indeed they have always been fraternal nations, or one nation, actually. The problem is that neither politicians nor soldiers are capable of devising any such story, let alone selling it to people. So, the task to prove the existence of the Polish-Czech Union falls upon the personalities of culture.

The Unexpected VICTORY OF THE POLISH-CZECH UNION in World War III

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

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

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

Opera is Fun!

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

The ballet treats Franz Kafka’s feted novel, revealing the absurdity and cruelty of the bureaucratic apparatus the protagonist grapples with to no avail. Bigonzetti masterfully combines dance, music and imaginative scenery, created by Carlo Cerri. Owing to its black-and-white visual concept and video projections, the production evokes the film noir aesthetics, thus paying tribute to Orson Welles’s seminal cinematic adaptation.

Kafka: The Trial

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

The Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich set Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk to a libretto he wrote together with Alexander Preis after the eponymous novella by Nikolai Leskov. He himself referred to the opera as a satirical tragedy. The main character, Katerina, is a murderess haunted by qualms of conscience. Yet, with a touch of bitter humour, Shostakovich also focuses on the moral decay of the inhabitants of a Russian village, revealing the omnipresent torpidity and recklessness. Life without hope and love is the very reason for the heroine’s downfall.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

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

During a single week, a girl grows into a woman and her dreams turn into a dark nightmare. The world is no longer as Valerie has imagined it. This initiation rite reveals the secrets of the passage to adulthood and social hypocrisy through hyperbole and sarcasm borrowed from Vítězslav Nezval. The production is a poetic adaptation of the bizarre dark novel, which still evokes emotions, passion and fear.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders

The councillors of Honice are to elect a bellman, the person responsible for security in the village. The task is formidable, with two strong candidates running for office – the veteran soldier Valentin Bláha and the tailor František Fiala. What is more, the mayor, Filip Dubský, and the first councillor, Jakub Bušek, obstinately sit tight, neither of them willing to compromise. The fraught situation is further aggravated by the municipal council receiving an anonymous letter threatening arson. A plethora of human types is presented on the stage – the “important persons” and their wives, old-timers, young lovers, lowlifes, pig-headed dimwits, tenacious truth-seekers and enthusiastic dupes. All of them live their little lives and great dreams, all of them desire, fight and argue, while the Red Rooster hovers above their roofs … Some 135 years after it was written, Our Uppish and Defiant Fellows is still a fascinating Czech play, a play about ourselves across generations and eras, a play in which the contest for the post of bellman becomes a gigantic struggle for truth and honesty.

Our Uppish and Defiant Fellows

Imagine you could create a new world from absolute nothingness. The kind of world you may dream about, safe, yet abounding in surprises and adventures. Our hero stands at the very beginning – with imagination and lily-white paper that can become anything. A new world arises from imagination, creativity and playfulness. Truly strange things happen in the paper world, and when its frolicsome inhabitants appear, rest assured that adventure will soon follow. But a boy who likes seeking new discoveries is sometimes somewhat impetuous, and he has to learn how to behave in the world of fragile paper so as not to harm it. There is, however, much more in store – you will see, for instance, the great power of kindness and good-willingness, and the boy’s paper pals will also help to find him the path to true friendship.

Paper Story

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

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

An original production showing how language is distorted by power, how shame is turned into a weapon, and how propaganda contaminates collective consciousness. The production premiered in 2024 in Georgia in direct response to the adoption of a governmental law against LGBTQ+ “propaganda” and instigated massive public rallies. Since then, the production can only be performed abroad.

Liberté [trigger warning]

DOX Centre for Contemporary Art

Song Recitals

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 speculations about whether Libuše is Bedřich Smetana’s most mature work within the context of his opera oeuvre, or even within the context of Czech opera in general, whether and how it can stand its ground as against the airiness of The Bartered Bride, the lyricism and absorptive power of Dvořák’s Rusalka, or the emotion and drama of Leoš Janáček’s operas, do not result in definitive conclusions – it will always depend on the angle from which Libuše and any other renowned Czech opera is viewed.

Libuše

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.

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

Although W. A. Mozart wrote Idomeneo to commission for the Munich court and Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria, a keen patron of the arts, who chose the subject himself, the opera is probably his most personal work (with the patriarchal system of blind obedience and a rebellion of the young seeming to evoke the composer’s tense relationship with his father Leopold), featuring excellently crafted characters. All the main protagonists are confronted with their own weaknesses or inability to defy fate. In the wake of the Trojan War, Idomeneo, King of Crete, made a fateful vow to Neptune, God of the Sea, to be executed should he arrive home safely. Just like the Old Testament’s Jephthah and Abraham, he faces the dilemma of whether to sacrifice his own child or to offend a god. Idomeneo ultimately yields, ready to kill his son, Idamante. Prince Idamante is in love with Ilia, daughter of Priam, the defeated King of Troy, who has lost her family and homeland in the war. Ilia is fond of Idamante, but hesitates to acknowledge her love of an enemy, whose father Idomeneo helped Achilles and Odysseus take Troy. Elettra, daughter of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, is wildly jealous of Ilia, and intends to win Idamante at any cost. Mozart rendered the heroes’ extreme emotions by means of ravishingly powerful music. He and the librettist Giovanni Battista Varesco ended the Ancient Greek story happily: Idomeneo’s old order gives way to the rule of love and reason, with Idamante and Ilia ascending the throne.

Idomeneo

Cranko’s Onegin, to be staged at the National Theatre, requires from the dancers expressive acting, brilliant technique and profound sense for conveying the characters’ emotions and feelings. Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse Eugene Onegin, a classic of Russian literature, enjoys worldwide fame and popularity. It depicts the story of hapless love between Onegin, a St Petersburg dandy, and Tatyana, the bashful daughter of a landowner. Cranko created his version for the Stuttgarter Ballett, who premiered it in 1965, with Márcia Haydée and Ray Barra in the lead roles. Pushkin’s heroes first appeared on stage owing to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who based his 1878 opera Eugene Onegin on the novel. Cranko, however, set his ballet to a compilation of other Tchaikovsky pieces, arranged by Kurt-Heinz Stolze.

Onegin

The young god Dionysus arrives in Thebes so as to initiate the city inhabitants into his cult. His passionate female followers, the Bacchae, revel in a strange ritual, during which they indulge in orgies and fall into a madness-like state. Their behaviour infuriates King Pentheus of Thebes, who confronts the stranger. Unfortunately, he has no inkling who his rival is, ignoring the advice of those around him to show humility. The arrival of a new god may not necessarily mean salvation, yet it certainly does herald the accession of a new order. Who is right? Is it Pentheus, who refuses to understand the impending change and instead strives to firmly grasp the world, or is it Dionysus the “rubble rouser”? Perhaps equilibrium can never hold sway without chaos …

The Bacchae

The Pelicot trial is undoubtedly the most publicised and discussed, and also the most symbolic, of our time. As in a sociological study, it shows that in a perfectly normal Western European city – the small town of Mazan in the south of France, close to Avignon – perfectly ordinary men from all social classes and age groups are capable of perhaps the most extreme crime: the repeated rape of an unconscious woman. “Shame has to change sides.” Through these words and her decision to make her trial public, Gisèle Pelicot has become a symbol of the fight against sexual violences.

The Pelicot Trial

Kulturní stanice Galaxie

Ranking among the highlights of Zemlinsky’s Prague concert activities was the performance of Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand in March 1912, and the Prague premiere of Schönberg’s Gurre-Lieder in June 1921. When it comes to Alexander Zemlinsky’s own music, today’s programme includes his magnificent settings of two Old Testament psalms for choir and orchestra, dating from 1900 and 1935, respectively.

Mahler – Schönberg – Zemlinsky

Traditional concerts of Christmas music at the National Theatre.

Advent concerts

Něhy v Opeře

Dakh Daughters, a Ukrainian band which has already gained renown, does not stand silent in the face of the current threats, but raises a vibrant voice. They offer their music, poetry, and theatre as an antidote to all willing to listen with their hearts and resist the lies intended to distort reality. Their “freak-cabaret” shows that art can give us strength, hope, and truth even in the darkest of times. Their project calls for unity and into a fight for a future where truth prevails.

Antidote

A small town, where the old world of liberal fathers is fading away, sees the raise of young idealists proclaiming revolutionary slogans. Some believe this is an inevitable change. Others crave for power. But there are also those, the most dangerous ones, whose only purpose is overall destruction.

Demons

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 ...

Dido and Aeneas

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

The Hungarian choreographer and former Artistic Director of Deutsche Oper am Rhein Düsseldorf, Youri Vámos, was inspired by Charles Dickens’s fairy tale and introduced a new staging version of this ballet. The story takes place in 19th-century London and tells of the magic of Christmas in transforming human character.

The Nutcracker – A Christmas Carol

Exceptionally sensitive production showing that in mutual relations, differences can be just as important as common traits. Mohamed creates theatre, film and installation works inspired by documentary film and practices. Israel is a virtuoso and iconoclastic flamenco dancer and choreographer. By placing their first names side by side, Mohamed El Khatib and Israel Galván attempt to bring together their worlds and artistic practices, as well as their personal journeys, through a dialogue across the Mediterranean. Together, under the spellbound gaze of their fathers, they seek a common language based on the body, its wounds and its scars. Taking their encounter and the sharing of their intimate, family and professional stories as their starting point, they explore in duo what a living archive and a documentary dance might be.

Israel & Mohamed

Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème ranks among the most frequently staged operas worldwide. The composer was inspired by the Paris-based painter and writer Henry Murger’s popular book Scènes de la vie de bohème, published in 1851, immediately sensing its enormous dramatic potential. He duly asked the librettists and playwrights Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica, with whom he had successfully collaborated previously, to pen a text for a new opera. Their fruitful partnership is among the most cherished in the history of opera, comparable to that of W. A. Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, or Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

La bohème

Almost three centuries have passed since the English painter, satirist and “forefather of the cartoon” William Hogarth created a series of eight paintings (and later on engravings), tellingly titled A Rake’s Progress – the path, development, simply the life of a libertine. They capture the story of a young man who inherits an immense fortune and proceeds to squander it on luxurious living, gambling and prostitutes. It is not a trait exclusive to the 18th century that people indulging in such a lifestyle end up at a psychiatric hospital, called during Hogarth’s time (and until recently) an “asylum”.

The Rake’s Progress

Coppélia tells a story of love, yet, unlike other Romantic ballets, in which unrequited passion leads to death, it ends happily (with marriage, thus complying with the 19th-century conventions).

Coppélia

Driven by the urgent need to create and express themselves together, Katerina Andreou and Mélissa Guex unite their voices and bodies in a vibrant performance in which shouting becomes an act of transformation. SHOUT TWICE explores the raw power of emotions, collective resonance and the fusion of movement, sound and space. The performance creates a fragmented narrative in which every moment is a rise in intensity, a pulse shared with the audience. Inspired by the structure of a concert it offers a sensory experience in which the scream becomes a driving force for joy, play and resilience. A space where excess becomes strength, where movement becomes music.

Shout Twice

Although many in his homeland still consider Leoš Janáček a difficult modernist, all over the world he has long been esteemed as a truly singular classical genius. His opera Katya Kabanova, based on A. N. Ostrovsky’s drama The Storm, deeply impresses every perceptive viewer due to its immense emotionality, attesting to Janáček’s extraordinary empathy. The title heroine, with her dreamy, amorous and heart-wrenching states of mind, is placed in stark contrast with the savage behaviour of those around her. The desperate Katya ultimately finds the solution to her inner conflict between desire and social obligation in the water of the river Volga. The National Theatre in Prague first performed Janáček’s opera a year after its world premiere in Brno in November 1921.

Katya Kabanova

A group of actors and an author attempt to stage Shakespeare's poem The Rape of Lucrece. They hold auditions for all the roles, analyze the text, reenact the situations, and connect them to their own experiences. As a band, they transform all the anger and pain into music. Sexualized violence is omnipresent and political. Countless stories, songs, films, and images of assault shape our culture. Director Lola Arias bases her play on research and conversations with victims of violence, artists, and philosophers. What images come to mind when we say the word rape? How much silence, fear, and shame do we carry with us? How is sexual violence embedded in our bodies and in society?

The Rape Of Lucrece: A Casting

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.

Der Zwerg (The Dwarf)

One of a Kind was premiered on 6 May 1998 at the Lucent Danstheater in The Hague by the  Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT) 1, helmed by Jiří Kylián. Commissioned by the Dutch government to mark the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Constitution of the Netherlands, the piece was revived in The Hague in 2023, with the performance attended by King Willem-Alexander and his mother, Princess Beatrix (formerly Queen). In 2019, the remarkable work was staged in Stuttgart, upon the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Kylián’s joining John Cranko’s Stuttgarter Ballett. Today, One of a Kind forms part of the ballet repertoire of prominent theatres worldwide. A sought-after choreographer, Kylián’s works have been performed on numerous other special and festive occasions, among them the gala inauguration in 2008 of the Norwegian Opera House in Oslo. In 2002, Kylián’s NDT featured in the culture programme during the NATO summit in Prague, hosted by President Václav Havel and attended by 42 heads of state. The Czech National Ballet will be presenting One of a Kind at the National Theatre in celebration of Kylián’s 80th birthday.

One of a Kind

The war of the “Seven against Thebes”, fought between Oedipus’ sons Polynices and Eteocles, ended with the brothers’ mutual killing. Creon the king orders funeral rites of honour for Eteocles, as the defender of the country, yet forbids the same to be served to the defeated Polynices. Antigone, the sister of the two dead men, is the only one who dares to disobey Creon, serving the rites herself. When discovered, Creon opts for her exemplary punishment... Antigone, daughter of the Theban king Oedipus and his wife (and mother) Iokasta, is one of the greatest characters of Greek mythology and world drama. Sophocles in particular rose her to fame in his eponymous tragedy, written around 442 BC, a chief work of Ancient Greek theatre. For Jan Frič, this is the third ancient play he will direct at the NT Drama, again in a new translation and retelling by Matyáš Havrda and Petr Borkovec.

Antigone

After 15 years, a Baroque opera is returning to the National Theatre repertoire, and after a full quarter-century the National Theatre staged a work by Jean-Philippe Rameau, the guru of 18th-century French opera: the globally renowned comédie lyrique Platée, which, however, has never before been performed in the entire history of the National Theatre and the State Opera, and its predecessor, the Neues deutsches Theater.

Platée

John Neumeier, the legendary American choreographer who for half a century helmed the Hamburg Ballett, based his Liliom on Ferenc Molnár’s 1909 eponymous play. He was the first to have created a dance adaptation of the work, depicting a tragic love story, set in the milieu of US fairs in the 1930s.

Liliom

Bedřich Smetana’s last completed opera, The Devil’s Wall, the fruit of collaboration with Eliška Krásnohorská, who penned the librettos for his previous operas The Kiss and The Secret, bears both its originally intended comic nature and, more significantly, a final lyrical tone. The composer evidently identified with the character of the ageing nobleman Vok, projecting his own feelings, perhaps ever more so than before. This remarkable work can thus be interpreted as, among other things, a reflection on Smetana's life, one fraught with emotional upheavals.

The Devil’s Wall

Three lonely existences cross their paths against the backdrop of one of the most famous novellas of the 20th century. The production presents an essay about old age, beauty, and the price paid both by the observer and the observed. It explores what happens where a person turns into an image – and where the image begins a life of its own. Beauty as a power tool and as powerlessness.

Death in Venice

The renowned Italian choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti created Scheherazade for the Czech National Ballet, in tandem with Carlo Cerri, his long-term collaborator. Based on the famous Middle Eastern story, the full-length ballet features a mesmerising, diverse dance idiom, and overwhelming visual dimensions. Mauro Bigonzetti, long-standing artistic director of the Aterballetto, Reggio Emilia, is a great modern dance innovator, one of the world’s most feted ballet creators and a sensitive storyteller. Blending contemporary and classical elements, he reveals and depicts the beauty of the human body almost like a sculptor, yet his works are far from academic. Bigonzetti has previously worked with the Czech National Ballet on three occasions. In 2016, Prague staged to great acclaim his Vertigo; in 2019, the Estates Theatre hosted the world premiere of Kafka: The Trial; and in the 2023/24 season, the State Opera presented his choreography to Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden within the unique project Holo Harmonies.

Scheherazade

With its subject, taken over from the German collection of ghost stories Gespensterbuch (Book of Spectres), and its dramatic music, Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz  (The Marksman) is a quintessentially Romantic piece, deemed one of the first, and most renowned, Romantic operas.

Der Freischütz (The Marksman)

When, in 1888, the music publisher Edoardo Sonzogno announced a competition for young Italian composers, who were invited to submit a one-act opera, he had not the slightest inkling that the victorious piece would become a timeless blockbuster. The 25-year-old Pietro Mascagni sent Cavalleria rusticana, which he had just completed. The premiere, in 1890 in Rome, was a true sensation, and the verismo opera, depicting ordinary contemporary people, villagers and low social classes, would remain Mascagni’s greatest success. Ruggero Leoncavallo decided to follow suit and duly composed his very first opera, Pagliacci, in the verismo style. Premiered in 1892 in Milan, the piece met with an enthusiastic response. In 1893, the two operas were first staged as a double bill, and ever since they have been frequently performed together.

Pagliacci / Cavalleria rusticana

Elizabeth Hunter, a woman who used to be the pivotal point of her little universe, lives a solitary life in a suburban house in Sydney. Once a stunning and spirited beauty controlling others with her iron will, she now faces the ills of old age and the ghosts of her own past. The former star and patron, celebrated for her sarcasm, is left with the entourage of nurses, a housekeeper and a lawyer, sitting as a silent queen in a beehive and desperately scheming to control and torment her relatives even at her deathbed.

The Eye of the Storm

Today Václav Trojan (1907–1983) is known primarily as a composer of outstanding scores for a number of 20th-century Czech films. The most noteworthy are the soundtracks to Jiří Trnka’s world-renowned animated movies Bayaya, Old Czech Legends, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Good Soldier Schweik; Bořivoj Zeman’s fairy tale Once Upon a Time There Was a King ..., featuring Jan Werich in the lead role; and Otakar Vávra’s August Sunday. Moreover, Trojan created the ballets Prince Bayaya and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which were performed to acclaim at the National Theatre in Prague, and the stage poem Golden Gate, to folk motives. He wrote one opera, Kolotoč (Carousel), for children young and old, as the secondary title indicates. The owner of a merry-go-round invites children to climb aboard: “If you want to see Indians, a kangaroo and gorillas, take a seat on the carousel!” And indeed: in the scenes that follow children are taken on dreamy trips to an African rainforest, the Australian Outback, an Indian jungle, as well as to the world of American film. Characterised by bounteous instrumentation and exquisite melody, Trojan’s music co-creates a colourful fantasy story.

Carousel

The German composer Richard Strauss based Salome, one of his most celebrated operas, on Oscar Wilde’s eponymous tragedy. The first to portray the title role in the play was the famed French actress Sarah Bernhardt (her company gave four performances at the National Theatre in Prague), whose art also contributed to the popularity of other dramas  (Tosca and Madame Sans-Gêne), subsequently adapted as operas.

Salome

With its original version premiered in Paris in 1841, Giselle is one of the major staples of the ballet repertoire and part of the global cultural legacy. The widely popular piece tells the story of tragic love, which even endures betrayal and prevails over death.

Národní divadlo

9 - 10 Jul, 2026

The Magic Flute / Die Zauberflöte (Prague Summer Nights)

11 - 12 Jul, 2026

Don Giovanni (Prague Summer Nights)

Aug 26, 2026 - Feb 14, 2027

Die Zauberflöte

Aug 27, 2026 - Jun 27, 2027

The Bartered Bride

Aug 28 - Nov 27, 2026

Don Giovanni

Národní divadlo