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Gustav Mahler Exhibition at Prague State Opera

From the start of the 2008/09 season until the end of this year, members of the PSO’s audience are welcome to visit, in the dress-circle corridor, an exhibition focused on the famous native of Kaliště near Jihlava, the great composer and conductor Gustav Mahler. The show, entitled Gustav Mahler and Vienna, which was first mounted on the premises of the Vienna State Opera, is on loan here from the Austrian Cultural Forum. It falls ideally within the broader framework of this year’s celebrations of the 120th anniversary of the Prague State Opera building. Still before the famed composer and conductor settled in Vienna, as the director of the city’s Court Opera and principal conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra to create an era that came to be indelibly linked with his name, he had gone through an experience-gathering stage involving several creative stops, including one at Prague’s German theatre (then the Königliches deutsches Landestheater, today’s Estates Theatre), where he spent the 1885/1886 season as its second conductor. After the premature departure of the company’s principal conductor, Anton Seidl, Mahler practically took over the leading post. At the close of the season, however, he left for an already previously negotiated engagement at the Municipal Theatre in Leipzig. While at Prague, he was in charge of mounting several major productions, including among others the Prague premieres of the first two parts of Wagner’s tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen.

He left Prague at a time when the construction was under way of the city’s new German theatre building, the Neues deutsches Theater, today the home of the Prague State Opera. Mahler then came back to this city for a guest appearance there only a few months after the new theatre’s opening, on August 18, 1888, to conduct – on a gala night marking the birthday of the Emperor Francis Joseph I – the premiere of his own adaptation of Weber’s unfinished opera, Die drei Pintos. As completed by Mahler, the opera was hugely successful, and still before the end of the month the premiere was followed by another six performances under Mahler’s baton; in all, the production reached a stage-lifespan of eighteen performances, including three showings at the Estates Theatre. However, his presentation of Die drei Pintos also became the last opportunity for Gustav Mahler to conduct opera in Prague. While he did return to the New German Theatre on several subsequent occasions, this was always to conduct the company orchestra’s philharmonic concerts, in programmes of his own symphonies. Apart from that, on September 19, 1908, he came to conduct, on Prague’s Exhibition Grounds, the joint forces of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and the New German Theatre’s orchestra, in the world premiere of his Seventh Symphony.

The work of Gustav Mahler, the “contemporary of the future,” as he was dubbed by his biographer, Kurt Blaukopf, set permanent roots in the concert repertoire of Prague’s German theatre, and the composer himself became – in terms of today’s jargon – an icon worshipped both for the new ethical values embodied by his music, and for his principled artistic stands which he manifested in both of his executive posts. The tradition of the New German Theatre’s philharmonic concerts was recently remembered by a performance of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in a gala concert marking 50 years of the Prague State Opera orchestra, on November 25, 1995.

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The Prague State Opera - Theatre History in Pictures and Dates - Book cover
The Prague State Opera – Theatre History in Pictures and Dates
Tomáš Vrbka
The Prague State Opera in cooperation with the Slovart publishing house publishes a representative book tracking the history of this significant cultural institution since its opening in 1888 till the end of the 2002/2003 season. The publication called The Prague State Opera – Theatre History in Pictures and Dates is focusing solely on the opera featured at the scene, even though the theatre under various names also served to presentation of drama plays, operettas and ballet. The Prague State opera plans to publish the volumes concentrating on those genres in the next years.

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