A visit earlier this year to two Baroque masterpieces of the Hapsburg Empire—Prague and Vienna—revealed a classical music ecosystem not usually glimpsed from the United States. From the perspective of New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, classical music appears fundamentally cosmopolitan. Musicians from remote corners of the world perform as orchestra members, soloists, and conductors. The Juilliard School and the Curtis Institute can seem the be-all and end-all of music education, with families across the Far East sacrificing to send their children to those storied training grounds.
But step outside this elite American musical bubble and one encounters a vibrant network of local European conservatories, competitions, and orchestras, unfamiliar to most Americans and populated overwhelmingly by local talent. The effect is to raise one’s optimism about the future of classical music.
In my first evening in Prague, I attended a song recital that I could only dream of hearing in New York, consisting exclusively of works by Bedřich Smetana and Antonín Dvořák. The concert, like all the events I attended in Prague, was nearly sold out months in advance. It took place in the Rudolfinum, a neo-Renaissance edifice at the edge of Old Town, named after the crown prince of Austria. The Czech Savings Bank opened the hall in 1885 as an “ornament to the city” and an “homage to art.” A statue of Dvořák faces the entrance; across the Vltava River rises the magnificent Prague castle complex, with its lush gardens and pastel-colored facades that gleam in the sunlight. (“Vltava” is “die Moldau” in German; it is the namesake of Smetana’s great tone poem, though one would not guess the river’s musical identity from its stately course through Prague.) The Rudolfinum hosts the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra; smaller ensembles, such as at this recital, perform in its Suk Hall, an elegant rectangular space of dove-gray walls and cream-colored Corinthian columns framed in rust red.
Both Dvořák and Smetana wrote cycles called “Evening Songs” (Večerní písně). Soprano Lada Bočková and pianist Ahmad Hedar performed both sets. If you feel (rightly) that Schubert’s 600-some songs are too few, rejoice! Schubert’s melodiousness, melancholy, and wistfulness flow uncannily into Dvořák’s Večerní písně. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you are unlikely to hear these beautiful works (and others like them) before you die, due to the infuriating narrowness of the American concert repertoire.
Dvořák composed the 11 songs in his Večerní písně in 1876, with texts by mid-nineteenth-century Bohemian author Vítězslav Hálek. Hálek’s poems are more ethereal than the German canon upon which Schubert drew, their erotic impulse sublimated into images of heaven and a placid nature. They do not form a narrative cycle, and yet here are the galloping rhythms of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin and the bleak desolation of Die Winterreise. Here, too, are the hypnotic repeated notes from the billowing piano line of “Auf dem Wasser zu singen” and the diaphanous melting of major into minor keys. The harmonic modulations in “Když bůh byl nejvíc rozkochán” (When God was in a happy mood) are jazz-like, while the vocal line remains pure and simple. Dvořák’s Prague Waltzes are adumbrated here and there, but these songs musically are more German Romantic than folk nationalist. They belong to a transcontinental musical discourse that flowed across national and ethnic boundaries like one of the great European rivers. The surface traffic on that musical current—the language of songs—was particular to this or that country, but the underlying stream knew no borders.
In this case, the sung Czech language was surprisingly soft; out of such daunting consonant clusters as srdce (“heart”) emerged caressing vowel sounds.
The five songs of Smetana’s Večerní písně are less elaborate than Dvořák’s. One song recalled the chord progressions of Chopin’s A-flat (posthumous) Étude, while the staccato accompaniment of another conjured a peasant dance.
The program contained opera arias and solo piano pieces by both composers, including the cloying G-flat Humoresque by Dvořák and “Song to the Moon” from Rusalka, with the latter transcription capturing the ominous, unsettling ambience of the orchestral score. The crushingly poignant “Songs My Mother Taught Me” (a loose translation of “Když mne stará matka zpívat učívala”), from Dvořák’s Gypsy Songs, was not on the program, despite its widespread popularity.
A tenor joined Bočková for an encore: a mesmerizing duet in which the tenor line, accompanied by clarinet, sways gently like lapping waves, while the soprano harmonizes below the melody before soaring ecstatically above it. I had guessed that the piece came from Smetana’s The Bartered Bride and was confirmed in that intuition by fellow attendees in the coat-check line. They provided the duet’s title—“Věrné milování”—and an approximate English translation (“Faithful love” or “I will be loyal always”). The composition clearly enjoys deserved national currency.
Bočková’ s voice was brilliant on top and rich in its lower range. In time-honored diva tradition, she changed from a black sequin strapless sheath in the first half of the program to a red ballgown with full skirt and tight bodice in the second. Hedar favored the hipster look that has become ubiquitous on European podiums—in this case, wearing an untucked, open-necked black-and-white honeycomb-patterned shirt, no jacket, tight pants, and no socks. His piano, however—a Fazioli—was a luxury item.
Both musicians came up through the ranks of an elaborate Czech training system. In Bočková’s case, that includes the Brno Conservatory, the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts, the Bohuslav Martinů Song Contest in Prague, the Czech Radio Prague Prize, the Prague Singer Competition, the International Competition of Antonín Dvořák at Karlovy Vary, and the Interpretation Competition of the Czech Philharmonic. Hedar studied at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and now teaches at Prague’s Jan Deyl Conservatory. Few of these institutions are familiar to Americans, but they produce a vibrant crop of performers and future arts supporters.
For all their musical sophistication, Czech audiences have yet to eradicate cell-phone outbreaks. A marimba ringtone broke out as Hedar was raising the piano lid for a solo. Its increasing volume prompted hilarity in the audience and a spoken intervention from the pianist before the clueless owner finally shut it off.
For the remainder of my time in Prague, I would hear massively familiar works from the international opera canon, even if the performers were almost exclusively Czech. Given the splendor of the Czech musical inheritance, I would have far preferred to have heard only Bohemian pieces. The non-Czech public’s awareness of Bohemian composers begins with the rise of musical nationalism in the nineteenth century. But numerous Classical-era composers have been exhumed and recorded in the last half-century and cry out to be more widely known, including Josef Mysliveček, Jiří Antonín Benda (today’s conductor Christian Benda is a descendant), František Dušek, and Václav Pichl. There are also less nationalist nineteenth-century composers such as Zdeněk Fibich, whose piano works have an affinity with Chopin’s. But since we are doomed to remain ignorant of the full output of even the most well-known Czech musicians—not just Dvořák and Smetana but also Leoš Janáček, Josef Suk, and Bohuslav Martinů—there is little chance that pieces from lesser-known composers will be programmed to any significant degree, even in the Czech Republic. To my despair, I missed by mere days the opportunity to hear two rare operas by Dvořák and Smetana—Armida and Libuše, respectively. I also missed another recital of Czech songs, this time including works by Suk (hardly known as a song composer) and his obscure (to Americans) contemporary Vítězslav Novák.
The Estates Theatre, in the heart of Prague’s Staré Město (Old Town), is sacred ground. It is the only theater still standing where Mozart once conducted—in this case, The Marriage of Figaro in 1787, the premieres of his Symphony no. 38 (“Prague”) and Don Giovanni that same year, and the premiere of La Clemenza di Tito in 1791, shortly before his death. The lime-green Neoclassical edifice could be passed without notice, lacking, as it does, a grand entrance and being hemmed in now by adjacent buildings. Inside, four rows of delft-blue balconies rise majestically upward to a circular ceiling decorated with garlands and stucco medallions. The orchestra has no pit; my front-row seat placed me nearly on top of a double bass player, who warmed up with contemporary riffs.
The Magic Flute made its Prague debut at the Estates Theatre on October 25, 1792. Mozart was dead by then (having died in Vienna on December 5, 1791, at the unbearable age of 35). Perhaps director Vladimír Morávek intended to invoke that specter with his current production of the opera. A haggard, hollow-eyed Mozart is present onstage from the overture onward, feverishly composing, observing, and conducting. This silent, supernumerary addition contributed nothing to the opera’s effect but simply suggested a desperate directorial effort at novelty. Morávek’s real, if baneful, contribution was to strip The Magic Flute of almost all its whimsy, something one would not have believed possible until seen with one’s own eyes.
The production was visually elegant, thanks to scrims and backdrops made up of a wild congeries of Renaissance and Baroque images—sea monsters, gryphons, cherubim, classical nudes, skeletons, architectural prints—like a mash-up of Hieronymus Bosch and Giovanni Piranesi. The costumes were eighteenth-century-inspired. The overture began thrillingly, with glorious blasts from period horns. But Morávek made incomprehensible cuts and interpretive choices. Papageno was a depressive clown, with long streaks of eyeliner running down his cheeks. Gone were the opera’s most endearing moments, including Papagena’s appearances as a flirtatious “16-year-old” crone, to whom Papageno must honor his ironic marriage vow. Instead, a nubile young Papagena, her head that of a parrot, hovered silently at the back of the stage, admiring her bare breasts in a mirror. She pairs off with Papageno at the end without having sung a word, including their sweet “Pa-Pa-Pa-Pa” duet. Tamino’s enchantment of the animals has inspired flights of directorial fancy over the centuries. Not here. Three men in sinister rat masks and gray gowns walked around the stage while Tamino played his magic flute; they showed no signs of ravishment. The three boys were three teenage females, thus eliminating the unearthly sound of the boy soprano.
The terrifying abyss awaiting any contemporary Magic Flute director is Monostatos. What to do about this stock comic Moor, who lusts after “eine Weiße [a white woman]?” Playing Monostatos in blackface, as has been traditional, is now out of the question. Morávek’s puzzling solution to the alleged “racism” problem was to portray Monostatos as Richard III, complete with black velvet doublet, blasted arm, and hump. Yet for all Morávek’s willingness to cut essential parts of the opera, he kept intact Monostatos’s radioactive explanation for his involuntary celibacy: “weil ein Schwarzer häßlich ist [because a black man is ugly].”
Fresh off her Dvořák-Smetana recital the night before, Lada Bočková, in a white organza dress, sang Pamina with bright purity of tone. Though dramatically a downer, baritone Jiří Brückler as Papageno shaped crescendos and runs beautifully. The Queen of the Night, Lucie Kaňková, in black paniers and a starry rhinestone headdress, flung out colorful cascades of notes, nailing her high targets (only once shrilly) and dipping into her low range with resonance. Tenor Martin Šrejma possessed a pleasing covered sound but lost breath during some of Tamino’s long lines. The spoken German among the singers was not as fluent as one might expect, given the linguistic legacy of the Hapsburg Empire.
Conductor Zdeněk Klauda pushed his European sartorial license to the limit. His untucked black shirt rose over his baggy black pants to reveal, every now and then, a trace of premature paunch. His musical leadership was less sloppy, however, and he kept the score moving forward with driving force.
With few, if any, exceptions, the entire cast was Czech. Ditto the production team. Their training was Czech—with the Academy of the Performing Arts, the Prague Conservatory, the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts, and the Jan Neruda Music Grammar School playing central roles. The heart of their careers was in Czech theaters, though their biographies carefully highlighted international engagements. The National Theatre Orchestra (Orchestr Národního divadla) contained no Asians and fewer females than one would find in the U.S. (though it had a female first violinist for the April 17 performance).
The pressing question after The Magic Flute was: Do the Czechs lack a sense of humor (as ridiculous as such a question is, in light of such satirical classics as Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk)? What better way to answer that question than with The Barber of Seville! By happy chance, Rossini’s masterpiece was in repertoire at the National Theatre, the 1883 Beaux-Arts flagship in Prague’s great triumvirate of performing venues. (It was at our old friend, the Estates Theatre, however, where The Barber of Seville made its Czech premiere in 1820, sung in German.)
Admittedly, it would take a catastrophe on the order of the Black Death to repress Rossini’s effervescence. And the National Theatre’s production of The Barber of Seville was hardly such a catastrophe. It was stylish, set on a minimalist stage depicting the stained outer wall and balcony of Don Bartolo’s Sevillian villa, the villa’s sitting room, and Rosina’s second-floor bedroom. Cacti abounded. Conductor Jaroslav Kyzlink conveyed the score’s wit, from the overture’s first delicate whispers, as if the orchestra were holding its breath, to the concluding headlong accelerandos and crescendos. Many of the comic setups produced their intended effect, especially Count Almaviva’s assault on the fastness of Don Bartolo’s villa, attired in too-short sailor pants, too-cropped a navy jacket, Ray-Bans, and a yacht captain’s cap. Was this the funniest Barber I have seen? It was not. Comparisons are unfair, but Bartlett Sher’s production at the Metropolitan Opera exploited comic possibilities that lay dormant at the National Theatre, such as music teacher Don Basilio’s repeated entrances into the music room and the increasingly desperate chorus of “buona sera”s from the romantic conspirators trying to shoo him away. (Granted, the presence of Juan Diego Flórez in the first run of the New York Sher production also makes a comparison unjust.) In the National Theatre production, Basilio simply walked back onstage each time without achieving the Bergsonian sense of mechanical repetition. Nevertheless, the performance, by director Magdalena Švecová, was funny enough to dispel the dark cloud left by The Magic Flute production.
The only non-Czechs in the cast for this performance were the Icelandic mezzo-soprano Arnheiður Eiríksdóttir as Rosina and the Slovak baritone Pavol Kubáň as Figaro. Their chemistry was good; she was suitably spunky, and he was virile and commanding, though there were some slurred syllables in “Largo al factotum,” as there were in Don Basilio’s great “La calunnia” aria. Tenor Martin Šrejma as Count Almaviva had some pitch and breath problems and looked worn out, but he rose, where needed, to princely suitor status. The production team was all Czech, with the usual deep experience in a wealth of Czech arts academies and companies. The hall was virtually sold out on a Thursday night; the only two empty seats adjacent to each other and relatively close to the stage were on either side of a gold gilt divider between two regal red velvet boxes.
These three performances were just a small fraction of the musical and theatrical events in Prague over the course of a week. That packed calendar is a legacy of the fertile Czech musical scene of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That ferment has been overshadowed, in our limited capacity to retain historical complexity, by Vienna and Paris. But on a per-capita basis, the Czech environment was arguably their musical equal. The Brno opera world teemed with new works; in 1921, the future concert pianist Rudolf Firkušný, then just nine years old, was so “overexcited” to be attending the premiere of Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová, as he puts it in his memoirs, “that [he] threw up.”
American harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani has lived in the Czech Republic for nine years. “It still astounds me,” he says, “how an entire culture takes interest in its orchestras.” Esfahani had recently played two concerts with the Brno Philharmonic. “Basically, the whole town just comes. A town of 500,000 people puts on daily concerts of chamber and choral music as well as opera, and they’re all pretty much sold out. It is a matter of civic culture and social cohesion.” That social cohesion was in evidence in the hordes of schoolchildren teeming throughout Prague’s monuments and museums. It could be felt as well in the unsolicited comments from Czech workers about the nonstop influx of Ukrainians into the Czech Republic. “We are no fans of Putin and Russia,” waiters and concierges would say, “and we welcomed these immigrants, but they do not share our culture.”
Vienna was the cradle of Western classical music from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century; it remains one of the three or four most important musical centers today. Not surprisingly, the soloists are more international than in Prague. A Mongolian bass-baritone, Amartuvshin Enkhbat, was the high point of a Tosca performance at the Staatsoper; I had heard him in 2021 in a preposterously updated Rigoletto (think: a dry-cleaning shop under a subway station) at the Teatro del Maggio Musicale in Florence. The other leading cast members were from Bulgaria, Italy, and Russia. The conductor, Yoel Gamzou, was an Israeli-American. At the Volksoper, I attended a feminist bastardization of Puccini’s La Rondine, ending with a fin-de-siècle version of Thelma and Louise, gleefully targeting the patriarchy. The production featured a German-British conductor, a Dutch director, a Swedish lead soprano, and an Italian-American Juilliard graduate as leading tenor.
Yet the seedbed of this worldly meritocracy remains a local culture of music-making and training. One cannot go far in Vienna and its environs without encountering classical music. I did not expect an open dress rehearsal of Schubert’s incidental music to Rosamunde and Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream when I visited the Esterházy Palace in Eisenstadt, and yet here it was, in the ornately frescoed and acoustically superb Haydnsaal (Haydn auditorium). The youth orchestra of the Berlin Philharmonic performed thrillingly under the baton of Marc Minkowski. The Augustinerkirche in the Hofburg offers eighteenth-century sacred music in its Sunday morning masses; on April 21, Haydn’s Jugendmesse and Vivaldi’s “Laudamus te,” from his Gloria, resonated with celestial radiance throughout the nave.
Musikhaus Doblinger, on the perimeter of the imperial Hofburg palace complex, features an entire room just for organ and choral music scores. Its cabinet of piano four-hand scores yielded such treasures as an elementary transcription of waltzes from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants. More accomplished pianists would have had a far greater set of options. Doblinger is just one of Vienna’s many music-score shops. New York can no longer support even one.
The orchestras in Vienna, like those in the Czech Republic, are composed predominantly of local talent—Austrians outnumber all other nationalities in the Vienna Philharmonic by several magnitudes, with Germans a distant second. (The men in the Vienna Philharmonic still wear delightfully lavish white frilled shirts, white vests, white bow ties, and black swallow-tailed coats, while the conductor is granted the usual wardrobe dispensation. Christian Thielemann was casual in a black turtleneck on April 22, but he brought out the terrifyingly exposed longing in Brahms, in a performance of the Second Symphony.)
The most striking aspect of these Central European orchestras, from an American perspective, is the lack of Asians. Not a single Asian is to be found in the Vienna Philharmonic’s violin, viola, cello, and double bass sections—something almost inconceivable, from an American perspective. In fact, there are no Asians in the entire orchestra. This is neither inherently good nor bad. It is just radically different. In the violin section alone of the New York Philharmonic, there are 20 Asians, including the concertmaster, out of 26 members.
Why the difference? Central European orchestras retain remnants of a guild system: students apprentice in local conservatories and get hired into the orchestras where their teachers play. Reflecting that close bond, performers’ biographies in concert programs often pay charming tribute to teachers, something one rarely sees in American programs. Central European conservatories do not need Asians to fill seats, and Asians gravitate toward American conservatories, because of the greater accessibility of English and the greater availability of scholarship money. In the United States, one worries that without Asians populating music schools and orchestras, the classical music world would shrink perilously. Once China realizes that playing an instrument is no longer a necessary attribute of upward mobility in the West, and once it figures out that, if you are Asian, playing two instruments at near-professional level does not help you get admitted to Harvard, it might stop training thousands of young pianists and violinists a year.
From the vantage point of the U.S., such a development seems like it would be lethal. We should be grateful that Asians have adopted the Western classical tradition as their own. (As non-Westerners, they are exempt from charges of cultural appropriation.) A global community of excellence is appropriate for this universal music of eros, joy, and sublimity. But there is also cause for celebration in the enduring roots of this art form in the places of its birth.
Top Photo: Seat of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Prague’s Rudolfinum, with its statue of Dvořák facing the entrance, opened in 1885 as an “ornament to the city” and an “homage to art.” (Timo Christ / Alamy Stock Photo)
