The Opera

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Nancy writes --
I did my best to comply with the good advice I had received from my friend who is from Spain and who is an interpreter at the Outreach Clinic where I volunteer at home. I put on my rouge and lipstick, curled my eyelashes (to look as ‘beautiful’ as possible). I put on my knee high stockings and my wool knee high socks, I wore my black tights (to keep from freezing in the -10C degree cold). I slipped on my black leather almost knee high boots (to look fashionable). But I balked at wearing any of my long black skirts or any of my ‘fancy’ spaghetti strap tops or silk blouses. I put on my white turtle neck sweater and gray wool slacks and hoped my new red boiled wool jacket would be festive enough for the Prague Opera. Five of us, enthusiastic music lovers, and brave souls headed out from the Reception Area to downtown Prague at 17:30 for the 19:00 performance of Puccini’s “Turandot”. The walk down the hill and past the old mill with the wheel still in place was thankfully uneventful. Since the entire hill after the Reception Area was covered with snow and the hill is very steep and the road quite curvy, I was not certain I could walk without slipping and falling. It is interesting to me that snow could fall each day and stay on the road for a week and still not turn into a mass of ice. The extremely dry air here seems to keep the snow very dry. So, we walked with little slipping but much care to the bus stop. A bus came along in about 5 minutes and we rode to the Museum metro stop. We successfully managed to leave the metro via the correct exit since one of our number inquired at the Information booth. She doesn’t speak Czech but it seems that is one of a few languages she doesn’t speak. During the evenings talk I learned that she speaks French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and most of the Slavic languages, Vietnamese, Mandarin and Cantonese, the languages of a number of tribal peoples in South East Asia and Indian peoples in South America, Italian, Greek, Hebrew and I now forget what other languages. In addition she reads ancient Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Sumarian, cuneiform and most of the languages of research. She has as her first degree a bachelors in piano and performed as a concert pianist for a number of years and has sung opera herself. She considers herself mainly as a theologian but is also a linguist. I am not sure which specialty her Ph.D. is in. She spent the years of the Vietnamese war working there with her husband who specializes in the treatment of people with leprosy. She has managed to contract malaria, typhoid fever and who knows what during her times working in little visited parts of the world. What an interesting woman!!! You can see we have been in this conference with some rather high powered brains this week. It was she who brought up the idea of going to the opera and the rest of us jumped at the chance to go. When we got out on the street and tried to go directly to the opera house, we were stopped by a security guard.
Apparently there is some government offices in that route and no one without proper id can go that way. We followed his directions and found the underground tunnel that lead across the busy 4 lane city street to the right side for the Opera entrance. The building itself is imposing and even the box office is lovely. It is the only area where you may take photos. So we regret not being able to show you the actual theater itself. It is wonderful! It has been completely restored with all the boxes outlined with gold relief and beautiful lamps. The central chandelier is just marvelous. It hangs from an elaborate ceiling that is also gold and white with many figures actually being like statues sticking out from the ceiling itself. Angels with trumpets, little folk of various sorts (classical in nature). I hope we can find a postcard of the inside to mail to some of our readers so they can see what I mean. We got tickets for the center balcony so we could look around at every special feature of the theater and also see the performance without anyone in the way. The sight lines are really good in the open and large theater. We tried to figure its seating capacity and decided it would be around 3,000 people. There was a large but not enormous crowd last night. Some folks came in all their formal finery others in nice clothing like we wore and a number of students both beautifully dressed and casual in bluejeans. Since the opera was what I would call a Chinese fairy tale, there were a lot of Asian students. The singers were top quality and the orchestra too. An interesting thing happened last night. During the first act the lead male singer was quite good and so were the others. The intermission seemed overly long to me but I was no judge of the length of time of European intermissions. When we returned, an announcement was made first in Czech and then in English that the lead male had suddenly become very ill and could not continue. Another singer in the group (obviously his understudy) had agreed to ‘save the performance’. He was, by appearance, a younger man. His singing was note perfect as far as we could tell. Our friend who is such an opera fan said he performed wonderfully. I knew only the most famous of the arias and my ears heard only perfection. He received tremendous applause after the aria which told me the audience greatly appreciated a wonderful performance done with no prior notice. He must have been very nervous and very excited to have such a chance. We certainly were glad he was so able and that we didn’t miss a single note of a perfect evening. There was a tiny bit of snow falling when we made it out of the subway and back to the bus stop. We met others from the conference who were returning to the campus after an evening of sightseeing and shopping. They had also enjoyed themselves very much. Prague is a magical city with sights to see, cultural events to soak in, goods of high quality or things to amuse friends for sale and a wonderful ambiance to indulge yourself in. We still are shaking ourselves to be sure we are not dreaming that we are in this situation.

This is Saturday morning and another adventure will begin in a few minutes. We open the library ourselves-by ourselves for the first time. We will have open hours from 10 til 1 or 10:00 til 13:00 as I must learn to say and think. I will be amazed if we get the doors open, turn off the alarm, get the lights on, the copiers running and the computers running without making any mistakes. I need to run now and get down the hill and see what we are able to do with the limited knowledge we have of the workings of the library.

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Photos

Czech State Opera House
I was allowed to take pictures only in the lobby. The lobby, as can be seen, is fancy, but compared to the theater itself the lobby is not fancy at all.

Czech State Opera House
Another view in the lobby. The box office can see seen at the bottom of the picture.