Estates Theatre

Historic · Staré Město (Old Town), Ovocný trh / ŽeleznáPrague,Czechia

A small steep Prague opera house of 1783, barely altered, where Mozart conducted the first Don Giovanni in 1787.

The Estates Theatre is a working opera house that Mozart conducted in, and the room has barely changed since. It is one of the very few late-eighteenth-century theatres in Europe still staging performances, and what you sit in is essentially what was built. It is small and steep, close enough to the stage that a singer needs no effort to reach the back row, and nothing in it was widened or modernised for a larger audience. It opened on 21 April 1783, with a Lessing tragedy rather than an opera. The Bohemian Estates, the assembly of the kingdom's nobility and towns, bought the house in 1798, and that is where the name comes from. Czech-language performances had already begun here in the 1780s, at a time when German was the language of the stage in this city, and the theatre has carried both repertoires ever since. Prague took to Mozart before Vienna did, and the house has never let anyone forget it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Buy a cheap seat rather than waiting for a tour — Upper tiers cost little and the room is the point; daytime tours run on a short, changing schedule and sell out.
The theatre stands free on all four sides — That is rare for a house this old, and the plain green rear tells you more about the room than the portico does.
The room is at its best with an audience in it — This is a working theatre, not a monument, and an evening performance shows the lighting and the boxes in use.

Things to do

1
Sit in the room Don Giovanni was written for
Take any seat, however high, on a night when the opera is playing. The score was composed for these dimensions and first conducted from the pit below you. Hearing it here is not a reconstruction or a costumed event — it is the ordinary repertoire of a working house that happens to be the original room.
2
Look up at four tiers of boxes
From the stalls, turn round and look at the auditorium instead of the stage. Then climb to the top tier and look again. The horseshoe is narrow enough that you can read the faces opposite, which is how an eighteenth-century audience was meant to sit: in sight of each other as much as of the stage.
3
Walk the free-standing outside
Circle the building on Ovocný trh. It stands clear on all four sides, pale green and plain, with the portico on one face and the working end of a theatre on the others. Seeing it whole explains why it looks like a box dropped into the Old Town rather than a facade attached to a street.