Published by The Telegraph (UK) on 23 May 2011. By Peter Hughes.
The maestros of Prague intensify the pleasures to be found in this most sensual of capitals, says Peter Hughes.
No one should need an excuse to visit Prague; Prague is reason enough to go to Prague. But if ever you wanted to embrace an extra sensation in this most sensual of cities, go during the Prague Spring festival and add music to the palaces and museums, the galleries and churches, cobbles and colours and every flamboyant architectural furbelow, flourish and frill of the past 700 years.
Go now, if you can. This year's festival opened a week ago and runs until June 4. Or wait a year. Prague is nothing if not constant, or operatic: it is Mozart in stone.
Prague Spring now has the stature of one of Europe's major music festivals. You can tell that from this year's hot tickets. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in the first week; John Malkovich and Simon Rattle are still to come. On June 2 the actor is narrating Michael Sturminger's 2009 work The Infernal Comedy, which includes music by Vivaldi and Beethoven, and the Berlin Philharmonic, under Sir Simon's baton, will perform Mahler's sixth symphony in the festival's closing concert on June 4. If those performances are sold out, it's still worth trying for others.
Music illuminates Prague. It also acts as a kind of stethoscope to the city's soul. Prague Spring, founded in 1946, was originally a celebration, an expression of liberation at the end of the Second World War and six years of Nazi occupation.
The optimism was to be short lived. Communist repression succeeded Nazi repression and the momentary glimmer of dissension during the "Prague Spring" of 1968 was extinguished by the invading armies of the Warsaw Pact.
So, May 1990 was a time of further celebration. The previous November the Velvet Revolution had brought the collapse of 40 years of communism and by huge good fortune I attended that year's opening concert. They were extraordinary days: Prague Spring now meant more than music.
I had been in the city in January. It was as if a great lid had suddenly been lifted from Prague and its people had emerged, dazed, into daylight. I was working for the ITV holiday programme Wish You Were Here…? Part of our story was that, instead of trying to survive on £10 a day, we endeavoured to spend £10 in a day. That notional budget would buy three Supraphon LP records, a set of Bohemia glass, lunch and dinner and travel by taxi. Only by buying a seat at the opera, which cost £3, could we hit the target.
It didn't last long. By the time I returned for the festival, prices had risen and a notice board, about 30 yards long, had been erected in Wenceslas Square giving news of the most important events of the past four decades. Every day crowds pressed up to the hoardings, curious to discover what had happened during the years of censorship in the state-controlled media. Today the destructiveness of those times is hauntingly captured by the sculptor Olbram Zoubek's Memorial to the Victims of Communism on Ujezd in Mala Strana – the Little Quarter. Six figures stand on a hillside in gradual stages of disintegration until heart and head are destroyed and only the legs are left. At the foot of the monument is this inscription: "205,486 convicted, 248 executed, 4,500 died in prison, 327 annihilated at the border, 170,938 emigrated."
The 1990 opening concert, held as always on the anniversary of the death of the composer Bedrich Smetana, was a profoundly Czech occasion. I felt an intruder. Rafael Kubelik, the Czech maestro, one of the founders of the Prague Spring, had come out of retirement, and self-imposed exile, to conduct Ma vlast – "My Country" – Smetana's set of symphonic poems.
Vaclav Havel, the "playwright president", as romantic a head of state as any nation has elected, was in the presidential box; the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra all wore the little red, blue and white "smiley" badges of the OF – Civic Forum – independence movement. It was at once powerful and private – all raw Smetana and emotion, almost sacred in its intensity.
Last week's opening concert was very different. The music was the same – Ma vlast – it always is, and the conductor was Czech, Jiri Belohlavek, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The setting, under the painted ceiling and glass rotunda of Smetana Hall, was also unchanged. The auditorium, decorated in white and gold, the ice cream colours of a fairground organ, is in the Municipal Hall, the city's most fantastical Art Nouveau building. Its wooden seats are as hard as ever.
But then the similarities stopped. If the 1990 concert had been about the Czechs rediscovering what it meant to be Czech, this year's sashayed with the confidence of a nation with no doubts whatsoever about its identity.
It is not nationalism. "We are only nationalist now when we play ice hockey," said someone. "Especially against the Russians." That self-assurance permeates Prague. The city that had begun to homogenise itself with pizzerias and pseudo pubs to keep its tourists happy is now almost unconsciously restoring elements of its "Czechness".
For instance, the Lobkowicz family has got its home back, or more accurately, homes. With the roots of their influence and wealth reaching back to the 15th century, the Lobkowiczs are one of the oldest surviving families of the old Bohemian aristocracy. In 1948 the communist government confiscated their lands and possessions. Among them were 13 castles and a 16th-century palace, the only private palace inside the small town that is Prague Castle. The family fled the country but returned in 1990 when, to their surprise, their property was returned. Four years ago the palace was opened as a museum.
Is it ignoble to confess that I entered ready to resent anyone who possesses the palace's view across the furrowed pantiles of Mala Strana, across the Vltava river to the domes and spires of the old town, let alone the palace itself or its contents? By the time I left I could imagine I had been added to the Lobkowicz Christmas card list.
My conversion was because of the intimacy of an audio guide in which four members of the family "show" you around their palace and its exhilarating exhibitions. So personal and anecdotal was the tour that I was quite expecting to stay for supper.
The collection is stunning. There are priceless pictures: a landscape by the elder Brueghel, painted in 1565, and two Canalettos of 18th-century London. There is Delft and Meissen china, Chinese silk and a room with walls bestrewed with military and sporting guns. But my heart-gasping moment was to find, in a dark display case, first a score of the Messiah reorchestrated by Mozart with a broad-nibbed quill and much crossing out, and then, in stacks of dusty paper, manuscripts of Beethoven's Fourth and Fifth symphonies annotated, corrected and signed in the composer's hand.
Joseph Lobkowicz, the seventh prince, was one of Beethoven's most important patrons.
Hour-long concerts are given daily beneath the stucco ceiling of the palace's Italianate Concert Hall. That's typical Prague: classical pops in digestible chunks, more often than not in the sort of sublime settings where the pieces would have been first performed. You find it all over town. Where some cities put supermarkets, Prague has Vivaldi.
The Czechs are rediscovering their food, too. Saturday morning farmers' markets are springing up around the city. I went to the one on the quay beside the Vltava, on Rasinovo Nabrezi. There the stalls were selling not just fruit and veg but babouka cake and kolecko pastries, smoked fish and dark sausages 18 inches long. Wriggling trout were netted from a tank on a truck and plastic bottles filled with wine at around £2 a litre from taps in the back of a van. A generation ago life was not like this.
The Museum of Communism on Na Prikope is exquisitely sandwiched between McDonald's and a casino. Along with a replica school room and baleful interrogation office, complete with soundproof door, typewriter and desk lamp, there is the reconstruction of a food shop. A few tins fail to fill the shelves and the meat counter is bare. "Czechs sent their dogs to Poland to eat; Poles sent their dogs to Czechoslovakia to bark," went a mordant saying.
It's not just home cooks who are buying from the farmers' markets, restaurants are shopping there too. Lokal, on Dlouha at the edge of the Jewish quarter, is a revival of the Czech pub. Some would say there are enough Czech pubs that they hardly need reviving, but their food does.
Lokal's aim is to cook dishes so "they are not pub-like", with none of the "tricks to make the food faster and cheaper." The menu changes throughout the day but when I was there you could have spicy sausages for around £3 and beef shin goulash for £4. At the other end of the price scale, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which unsurprisingly has an Asian eatery, offers a Czech menu as well.
I asked a friend how Prague had changed in the 12 years she has lived there. "It hasn't really," she said. "There's just more of everything." Rene Beauchamp, general manager of the Four Seasons Hotel, agreed: "Ten years ago I remember a lady bringing us herbs from her garden twice a week. We used to have a fish twice a week too; now we can have it every day."
There are certainly more tourists, but Prague manages to rise above them – literally. This is a city that is invariably more interesting when you look up. It's not just the sight of the 460-year-old Astronomical Clock, nor the hourly procession of the apostles above it; it's not the Gothic spires of St Vitus's Cathedral, which were actually completed in 1929, nor the Baroque statues lining the Charles Bridge.
It's the detail that delights: the turrets and mosaics on the Art Nouveau buildings along Parizska, the street where the convertible Aston Martins now park outside Dunhill and Porches prowl around Prada. It's the frescoes in the dome of St Nicholas and the stucco and gables in Old Town Square.
It's the way centuries-old buildings have been imperceptibly adapted to 21st-century purposes. The Four Seasons, enviably situated beside the river, a stroll from the Old Town, is an architectural chameleon. Ten years ago, three buildings – neo-Renaissance, neo-Classical and Baroque – were turned into the first true five-star luxury brand in the Czech Republic.
From the outside you would never know. Whatever else may happen, Prague will always look like Prague. But if you really want to know what's going on, the answer is in the music.
No comments:
Post a Comment