Mozart's Prague

"Meine Prager verstehen mich," Mozart once said. My Praguers understand me. According to Maynard Solomon's "Mozart: A Life", when The Marriage of Figaro opened in Prague after its Vienna premiere it was met with "unlimited applause". In Prague, he was beloved. His Prague fans even paid for him to visit them in 1787 to see the show himself. A week later he gave a private performance on 19 January 1787 where he played Symphony No.38 in D major for the first time. It became known as the Prague Symphony and Mozart considered that day one of the happiest of his entire life.

The Prague Symphony begins patiently. Such lazy starts were rare for Mozart's symphonies. Only the 36th and 39th share this. But you can hear echoes of the Don Giovanni overture here. The second movement isn't as tight as a typical Mozart, but the third slips in a flirty nimble flute. Anthony Hopkins (English composer, not the Welsh actor) said about the third movement that it "shows Mozart in an unusual mood, nearer to Beethoven's boisterousness than his fastidious taste normally allowed him to go."

The Viennese public was fickle toward Mozart. They hated him, they loved him. They loved him, they hated him. Allegedly when Emperor Joseph II heard The Abduction from the Seraglio, he said it had too many notes. But in Prague, no one questioned his genius. After Prague was absorbed by the Catholic Austrian Empire, part of the assimilation process involved requiring every teacher to compose and perform church music with their students. It not only helped turn them into Catholics, it made them avid musicians -- and lovers of the likes of Mozart. Plus, all the stuffy Prague nobles had left for the new capital in Vienna and what they left behind were a load of middle-class merchants who'd been musically educated through the Church but unlike their royal rulers, liked whatever was new.

But despite all the adoring fans, Mozart eventually left Prague. The musicians there simply weren't as good as in Vienna. Even the Praguers who could play well went to the new capital for work, and so did Mozart. But it was here that Mozart composed Don Giovanni in this very building. It's maybe the only one still standing in which Mozart worked, and performances of Don Giovanni can be seen here every night at 8PM. Kierkegaard adored Don Giovanni, thought it was one of the greatest works of art in history and wrote about it at length (and boringly, I find) in Either/Or. Flaubert said the three greatest things God ever created were the ocean, Hamlet and this opera.