Opera Houses: "If This Was a Bordello..."

My friend Bob on the Prague State Opera House:

If this was a bordello, you’d say it was over the top.

But it’s not a bordello, it’s an opera house, built under the old Hapsburg Empire. So the fact that it looks like a perfumed cream cake is just par for the course. These delicacies are scattered all over the old Hapsburg domain. I hear there is one architect who did a bunch of them, but I haven’t been able to pin it down on Google just yet—I suspect I need to read Ruth Bereson’s The Operatic State (link) but at $120 a pop I think I will try to restrain myself.

Prague alone has three opera houses. At least two—the State Opera and the National Theatre—are cream cakes (I haven’t been inside the third). I particularly like the one—I think it is the National—with the bare-bosomed enameled caryatids who look like they are going to leap off the wall and chew your brains out during the encore. There’s an even better specimen down the road at Bratislava. Beyond that, exactly how far it extends is hard for me to say. Budapest seems a bit tame by comparison, but the basic design is similar. The Vienna SaatsOper has is own history, and its own garish ludicrosity but whether it is an imitation or an independent creation, I am not so sure. Meanwhile, I remember the first time I saw La Scala in Milan a number of years ago. I thought—right, Hapsburg—though whether I was thinking of the same thing or not, I can’t quite remember.

In a sense, I suppose it is impossible to say why this matters. It’s the music and the theatre that counts and when the lights are out (as the old saying goes) they all look the same. Still, there is something over-the-top absurd about all of opera. I guess it’s nice to know that the designers of the theatres understood themselves as part of the grand master plan.

Pix: The interior above is the Prague National Theatre, complete with caryatids. The exterior at left is Bratislava and hey, what can you expect from a Treo 650? For better photos of Prague opera houses, go here.