Tomáš Vrbka: Prague State Opera / Opereta and Ballet 1888 – 2008 A History of the Theatre in Pictures and Dates (Book)

Six years after the publication of the opera house’s pictorial history, the Prague State Opera brought out, in June 2010, a new book in the same vein, this time focused exclusively on operetta and ballet productions between the years 1888 and 2008. Once again a representative, coffee-table format volume, the book has 776 pages with close to 1,400 illustrations. Owing to the demise of the theatre’s archives after the Second World War, it was again necessary to reconstruct substantial parts of prewar pictorial documentation from other archival sources, such as the National Museum in Prague, the Art Institute/Theatre Institute in Prague, the Austrian Theatre Museum in Vienna, the Austrian National Library Archives in Vienna, the German Theatre Museum in Munich, the Berlin Municipal Museum Foundation, the Hungarian Theatre Institute in Budapest, and last but not least, some of the most prestigious international opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera of New York. Significant contribution to the book’s sections illustrating more recent history was rendered by the archives of the National Theatre in Prague, the National Theatre in Brno, the National Theatre of Moravia and Silesia in Ostrava, the Slovak National Theatre in Bratislava, and the Czech Press Agency.

While the present book links up in more than a few aspects with its opera-oriented predecessor, it is not the standard volume two type of text which can be grasped only providing the knowledge of the first part. Rather, the book’s autonomy is still underpinned by its passage in the opening chapter, containing a brief outline of the theatre history’s milestones, as well as the reprint of an entire chapter, The Theatre Building in the Metamorphoses of Time, with amendments and new illustrations. Compared with the preceding book, the new publication contains more text with biographies of leading operetta and ballet composers, as well as more extensive information about guest appearances by domestic and international ensembles and individual artists. The accompanying text is in three identical language versions (Czech, English, and German), making the book accessible to a wide international public interested in theatre history. Part of the text is the complete list of premieres and new productions, a name index, and index of works.

The book was published with financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the Czech-German Fund for the Future, and the SOP’s corporate partner on the project, Papyrus Bohemia s.r.o.

Size: 245mm x 315mm