Day 4, Part 2: The Opera

Wednesday, May 16, 2012 (continued)

Opera in the evening! The Institute gave out tickets to all the students, and we dressed up and walked over to the Opera. 

"Dressed up," that is, in whatever we'd brought with us, which made us a somewhat motley bunch. We had everything from shorts and t-shirts to full-fledged evening gowns. 

The Prague Opera has possibly the most ornate interior of any building I've ever seen. Elaborate Rococo scrollwork has grown up like ivy to cover every possible surface. There are paintings on the ceiling (easily visible from our balcony seats), with some of the foreground figures and scenery done as trompe l'oeil relief sculptures, which blend seamlessly into the wild swoops and curls of ornamentation that serve as irregular frames. It's a beautiful effect. Everything whirls into everything else. There are statues holding up pillars, reclining below the ceiling, arching out over the boxes with wreaths and musical instruments in their hands. 

None of my photographs came out, to my great disappointment. The lighting was just too romantically dim. 

The opera we saw was Rusalka, by Antonin Dvořak, whose name I cannot type properly on an American keyboard. (I've been looking up Czech words on Google and copying the accented characters from there when I need to write them.) Fortunately, there was a screen with English translations of the words above the stage, so we could understand what was happening. The singing was incredible; several of the arias sent chills up my spine, and there were some beautifully complex harmonies in the few chorus numbers. We could see the delicious, opulent detail in the sets and costumes even from our seats near the ceiling. The story was similar to The Little Mermaid (perhaps based on the same original story?), but with a nearly completely useless prince and a much more ambiguous ending. The Little Mermaid tends to have a happy or a tragic ending, depending on which version you read. This was... somewhere in between. Bittersweet, perhaps. 

A lot of the opera was left up to the viewer, actually - particularly the motivations of the witch, who was probably the most interesting character. You were never quite sure whether she was trying to help the other characters or destroy them.