Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City

by Peter Demetz

  The responses of the Bohemian patriots to the challenges of Emperor Joseph’s reforms are not easy to describe, and they are certainly more intricate than later nationalists assume. A strong beginning of a new Czech intellectual renaissance would have been impossible without his abolition of censorship and his imperial preference, adverse to Baroque hierarchies, for rationality. There was much agreement with Joseph’s rationalist views but at the same time much opposition to his centralizing policies, which again triggered a rising interest in the history of Bohemia and a rediscovery of the privileges and riches of the Czech language (the first university chair of Czech was established in Vienna in 1775, and another one shortly after Joseph’s demise, at Prague University, in 1791). University professors were important: in Prague, above all, the Saxonborn Karl Heinrich Seibt, the first non-Jesuit professor of belles lettres, introduced young Germans, Czechs, and Jews to the most recent achievements of German philosophy; he certainly prompted a few Czech intellectuals to believe it was nigh time to compete once again.

  The aristocrats, troubled by restless peasants, increased taxes, and their loss of ceremonial positions, had particular reasons to push for Bohemian special privileges. Franz Joseph Count Kinsky wrote a lively defense of Czech and recent German writing, and the lord burgrave Franz Count Nostitz opened his Prague town palace to learned scholars of the Piarist order and to ex-Jesuits who were busy excavating forgotten documents of Bohemian history, publishing authentic editions of chronicles, and defining the nature of the Czech language. Many of the scholars were elective Czechs, who were born of German-speaking parents but learned Czech in the schools. Gelasius Dobner wanted to do away with the false and “ridiculous fables” of Bohemian history and published an essential edition of historical sources; Mikuláš Adaugt Voigt, an open enemy of Germanization, compiled portraits of exemplary Czech artists, scholars, and humanists; and František Martin Pelcl enthusiastically praised Rudolfine Czech as a perfect language that did not need any correction or addition. Abbé Josef Dobrovský, an ex-Jesuit and trained missionary (he was to go to India), was hired on Seibt’s recommendation as tutor to the Nostitz family. He was a scholar of genius who, turning from Oriental to Slavic studies, in his treatises, grammars, and histories established the foundation of Slavic philology, though mostly writing in Latin and German and never relinquishing his rational and skeptical views. Dobrovský was suspicious of the advancing romantic generation, who, after studying the German enthusiast Herder, considered only language “the true character and the community spirit of a nation”; though they may have been inspired by the most noble sentiments, they prepared the ground for ethnic belligerence, which was foreign to the circle of Bohemian nobles.

  While patient patriotic scholars were discussing the etymology of the terms ech and Slovan, questions loaded with ideological preconceptions, many quarters of Prague lay desolate and in ruins after all the battles and sieges and the closing of churches and cloisters. Yet Praguers now for the first time enjoyed a few modern urban amenities. A special committee appointed by the emperor and charged with beautifying the disheveled city filled the moats between the decaying fortification walls of the Old and New Towns, planted decorative trees, and created the New Alley, or today’s Národní tída, an elegant boulevard of fashionable shops, traditional bookshops, and overpriced restaurants leading from the City Center to the National Theater and the Café Slavia. The university library, enriched by books and manuscripts from the abolished monasteries, was opened to the general public, including Jewish readers, and a private postal service (later integrated with the state) operated in a frequent and orderly way. An enterprising lending library of 8,000 volumes opened its door to a new middle-class readership, and the first horse-drawn cabs, or Fiakers, according to Viennese lingo, were for hire. More importantly, publication of Czech newspapers was resumed—first by the Schönfeld family, who also owned a flourishing printing press, and later by Václav Matj Kramerius, a Czech patriotic publisher of note; his eská Expedice, or Czech book distribution, was essential to readers and writers of the Czech eighteenth-century renaissance and functioned well into the 1820s.

  It did not escape the emperor’s attention that administration of the Prague towns was a Baroque hodgepodge of colorful and conflicting competencies, and by his court order of February 12, 1784, all the dignities, functions, and privileges of the four towns—Old and New, the Vyšehrad, and Hradany—were abolished, the legal autonomy of the Jewish community was abrogated (only decisions concerning religion and civic matters remained to the elders), and a central and unified magistrate of the city of Prague was appointed, with a mayor and two assistants. City affairs were to be considered by three senates, for legal, criminal, and financial matters, members of which were elected by a body of worthy citizens appointed, however, by the imperial authorities; later, even that last trace of an elective process was obliterated and all civil servants were appointed from above. It may have been Prague’s first efficient city administration, but it was put in place by court decree, at least until the revolution of 1848.

  Mozart at the Bertramka

  To sustain a theater was an expensive affair, and since the court resided in Vienna, itinerant Italian opera companies sporadically performed at the Prague baronial town palaces for fashionable audiences from which mere bourgeois were largely excluded. Franz Anton Count Sporck was the first to operate a private theater, in the garden of his New Town residence at Hybemská Street, and he opened it to a wider audience. A restless parvenu of wide philosophical and aesthetic interests (suspicious to the authorities), he soon recognized that he needed the help of an expert impresario. In 1724, he invited the Italian Antonio Denzio, who shifted the repertory to mostly opera—not for long, unfortunately, because Count Sporck lost interest in his theatrical hobby and Denzio lacked other financial support.

  In the late 1730s, Prague was again without a theater, though the appetites of the nobility and the patricians had been whetted. An Italian musician, Santo Lapis, born in Bologna and stranded in Vienna, sensed the potential market for opera, and he appealed to the lord burgrave to allow him to run a few seasons at the Sporck theater. He quickly discovered that it was technically too small and too primitive to serve his new purposes; ingeniously, he turned to the patrician magistrate of the Old Town and suggested that a more modern theater was needed to satisfy everybody. After an exchange of letters in wonderful Baroque German, the Old Town council, enjoying its new role as patron of the arts, resolved that the upper floor of an ancient market hall in the quarter of St. Gallus would be appropriately reconstructed (patriotic women, among them the wife of the lord mayor and her friends, invested a good deal of money) and rented to Santo Lapis. A sharp protest from the Carmelite convent nearby was gracefully accepted and, for all practical purposes, totally ignored. Santo Lapis proudly called his institution “il nuova teatro della communità della reale città vecchia in Praga nel loco della Kotzen,” this noble Italian phrase barely camouflaging the fact that downstairs, in the little booths and cubicles (called Kotzen or kotce), clothes cutters and fur merchants went on with their business as they had since the reign of King Charles IV. The term Kotzen originally referred to rough wool cloth sold at that particular place, and the people had no qualms about speaking of their new institution as the Kotzen Theater or Divadlo v Kotcfch.

  In its history of more than forty years, the market-hall theater reflected the vicissitudes of Prague during the Prussian sieges and bombardments, as well as the many interests of its successive impresarios wishing to serve all audiences, high and middle, German and Czech. (When they thought that ticket sales were decreasing, they applied to the magistrate for permission for Jews to attend but were turned down regularly.) These impresarios mostly came from Italy and northern Germany (among them Barbara Schuh, wife of an important German theater producer and an emancipated entrepreneur in her own right), but there were also Josef Kurz, from Vienna, famous in his role as the articulate clown Bemardon whose improvised
language games would have pleased Wittgenstein, and, from Prague, Johann Joseph Brunian, who charmed audiences throughout the monarchy with his performances in drag (as Demoiselle Brunner) and who, as director, surprisingly preferred German plays of the most literary kind. The theater had to compete constantly with other spectacles in town: magicians, troops of acrobats, and tightrope walkers performed in the public squares, and on a nearby island in the Vltava regular Hetzen or Štvanice were held in a popular baiting place; fiery bloodhounds tore bears, stags, goats, and innocent does to pieces, and the audience roared.

  It was good business practice to offer an eclectic repertoire at the theater. It included burlesques, ballets, and sentimental comedies, popular with audiences in Vienna and Leipzig, but the Prague public had also had an opportunity to listen to music by Pergolesi as early as 1747, Christoph Willibald von Gluck, and the Czech composer Josef Mysliveek (“il divino Boemo,” the divine Bohemian, of course, resided in Italy) or to attend new plays by Goldoni, Diderot, Lessing, Beaumarchais—all in German, to be sure. At the end of the 1771 season, the first play was given in Czech and, judging from the reviews, it is still difficult to say whether the performance was an unmitigated disaster or a praiseworthy demonstration of patriotic importance, or both. The text of Kníže Honzík (Duke Johnny) was adapted from a successful little German comedy, but in the absence of professional Czech actors it was performed by the same people who had previously done the German presentation, and their Czech was not beyond criticism. It was a play about a poor farm lad who dreams of being suddenly rich and noble (his fiancée, Dorka, suspects that Anika, another village girl, has put these wild ideas in his head). Fortunately there is a happy end: Honzfk, as if waking from a dream, embraces Dorka and honestly praises her: “You are my dukedom, my beer, and my pot roast.” Even the learned patriot Prantišek Martin Pelcl liked this pioneering piece because the Czech text was close to the spoken idiom of country people.

  In the later 1770s the impresarios of the market-hall theater ran into financial problems again, and a competing Italian opera group from Dresden regularly performed at the Thun Palace in the Minor Town. Even the honest efforts of Carl Wahr, a professional from Hungary, were not sufficient to solve the complications at the market-hall theater. At that time Franz Anton Carl of Nostitz-Rieneck, a rich friend of the arts, Freemason, lord burgrave, and in loyal opposition against too much Vienna centralization, conceived the idea of building, out of his own pocket, a new “national theater” to please and enlighten his Bohemians and to compete with the Viennese institutions as well. The announcement of his project (to be built at the later Ovocný trh, or Fruit Market) revealed that he used the term “national” in the territorial sense used at the moment and by his class, not yet in the linguistic meaning of a later romantic generation. What he had in mind (as did Lessing, whom he admired) was an institution independent of the court and serving, if not creating, a civil society at large, and he insisted that he was not opposed to a performance of any legitimate play in any language; after all, Pelcl, an important scholar of the Czech renaissance, was chief tutor to his family. The town magistrate, patron of the old market-hall theater, was not particularly pleased, and the university protested, rightly feeling that a high building in the neighborhood would darken the lecture halls nearby, but Nostitz had an imperial letter of endorsement and all opposition ceased. Construction started on June 7, 1781, and finished two years later (enemies of the project hired gangs who often destroyed by night what was built by day). The original plans may have foreseen a late Baroque building but the Prague architect Anton Haffenecker ultimately preferred a classical style, with striking symmetries, four Corinthian columns, and the crest adorned with the words in gold “Patriae et Musis” (to the Fatherland and the Muses), an inscription never changed by any later regime. On April 21, 1783, the splendid new theater was opened with a performance of Lessing’s tragedy Emilia Galotti, in which an enraged father kills his daughter in order to protect her virtue (endangered, he believes, by an amorous prince); the choice of the play clearly indicated that the aesthetic intentions of the new theater were independent and high.

  Count Nostitz wanted to run his theater with Carl Wahr and his troupe (using the market-hall theater merely as storage space for costumes and painted scenery), but the shift was difficult; when the emperor briefly attended a performance and suggested that the count hire the more experienced impresario Pasquale Bondini, a singer and producer well known in Prague since the mid-1760s, his advice was quietly taken. Nostitz appointed Bondini as his “Impresario theatralischer Spektakel” in 1784, and it was an excellent choice—mostly because Bondini, who had far-flung interests in Dresden and Leipzig, relied on the loyal Domenico Guardasoni, a distinguished singer and opera producer, renowned in Venice, Prague, Vienna, and Warsaw.

  Bondini and Guardasoni were most attentive to opera production, and they left comedies and plays to Franz, or František, Bulla, a director born in Prague and intrigued by the possibility of producing Czech plays for a widening audience of enthusiasts. He was encouraged by his brother Karel, who translated from German, and by the Czech poet Václav Thám, possibly the first of the passionate language romantics (in spite of his rococo verse), and in the 1780s five Czech plays were performed and often repeated to sold-out houses. These plays, mostly adaptations from the contemporary German repertory, included a maudlin comedy about an army deserter who, out of filial love, is saved in the end by the gracious emperor himself, and the drama Štpán Fedynger aneb sedlská vojna (Stephan Fadinger and the Peasant War). It represented the peasant revolt in Upper Austria, possibly reminding the Prague audiences of the march of peasants on Prague in 1775, their defeat by the army, and their four leaders being hanged by the Prague town gates; in the play, peasants and the enlightened emperor turn against the cruel nobles. The first original Czech historical play, “Betislav [and] Jitka,” written by Václav Thám himself, celebrated the manly virtues of a mythical Czech ruler and his modest Jitka, whom he rescues from a cloister and marries, regardless of the difference of class. The remarkable ensemble of Czech plays, and their social implications, may have challenged a few of the nobles and perhaps some German burghers as well, for pressure on Bondini increased, and the Italian impresario, to his regret, on March 1, 1786, fired the Czech-speaking actors. They did not want to leave Prague and petitioned the authorities for permission to establish a German-Czech theater, but were repeatedly turned down. Finally, they decided to appeal to the emperor personally (who in so many plays sided with the peasants and the oppressed) and speedily received his express approval to perform in a theater of their own. A rough wooden construction was built on the square later called Václavské námstí; it opened on July 8, 1786, with the Czech adaptation of a patriotic German play, preceded by a prologue praising the emperor and concluded with a pantomime about Prague women cooks. When Joseph himself, a few months later, attended a performance of the new Imperial and Royal Patriotic Theater (called Bouda, or hut, by its Czech friends), he created a sensation among Czechs and Germans, if perhaps for different reasons. Not much later Mozart came to Prague, and I wonder whether he ever sensed that the Czech and German theaters had institutionally just parted ways.

  Mozart did not have an opportunity to attend the performance in Prague in 1782 of his comic opera, or Sitigspiel, The Abduction from the Seraglio by the Carl Wahr troupe at the Nostitz theater, but he was pleased to report from hearsay to his father that it was a success; Franz X. Niemetschek, his friend and first biographer, who attended the premiere, later confirmed that the audience was overwhelmed, especially by the bold harmonies of the score and the use of the woodwinds, particularly dear to Bohemians. Four years later it became known that Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro had not been received in Vienna without reservations, so his Prague friends and admirers banded together to invite him to attend, or even to direct, one of the Prague performances scheduled by Pasquale Bondini’s cast. In Vienna the opera had been performed against consid
erable resistance only nine times (twenty constituted a success), and there may have been many reasons why it was received so coolly—Franz Xaver Count Rosenberg-Orsini, director of the Vienna opera, and many of his Italian singers did not like Mozart’s sympathies with the German Singspiel; subscribers to the elegant boxes, all aristocrats, were offended by the political implications (though Lorenzo da Ponte had much softened the challenge to the ancien régime implicit in Beaumarchais’s play on which the opera was based). The music, with its sudden shifts from heated emotion to cool restraint, as well as da Ponte’s sophisticated text, often employing his Venetian idiom to hide the barbs, may have been simply offensive to the Viennese nobles, who certainly believed that Mozart and da Ponte were rather too close to the emperor’s egalitarian reformist spirit.

  In Prague, the reasons for coolness were as many as arguments for enthusiasm, but it was an oversimplification to welcome Mozart, as it happened, with a German ode distributed at the theater, as a “German Apollo.” Mozart often wondered why the Germans did not create a German national opera of their own, and he wrote witty German Singspiele in unison with the emperor’s oscillating tastes. But he liked Italian and Italian-trained singers and was, in alliance with da Ponte, opposed not to ltalianità as such but rather to the conventions of the dominant Neapolitan theatrical style, much favored by Count Rosenberg-Orsini and his crew in Vienna.