Prague's Famous Visitors

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“Here they talk about nothing but Figaro,” Mozart wrote jubilantly during his first trip to Prague. “Nothing is played, sung, or whistled but Figaro! Certainly a great honor for me!” It was January 1987 and a year since Figaro had opened in Vienna to a cool reception. But Prague loved it – “my Praguers understand me,” (Meine Prager verstehen mich) Mozart said. In gratitude he premiered Don Giovanni, his next opera, at the Nostitz Theatre (now Stavovské divadlo) later that year, dedicating it to “the good people of Prague.”

The tide had ebbed by the time Mozart made his last trip to Prague, in 1791, the year he died. His last opera, La Clemenza di Tito, commissioned for the coronation of Leopold II – and completed on the coach from Vienna to Prague – was not popular. In fact, Leopold´s Spanish wife Maria Luisa shouted “German hogwash!” from her box.

Ludwig Van Beethoven
In 1796 Beethoven visited Prague as the guest of the Count of Clam-Gallas. Enjoying international success and not yet suffering the poor health that would blight his later years, the 26 year-old Beethoven was in a frivolous mood. In a letter to Czech musician Vincenc Houšek, he wrote “Enjoy, dear bum! May you have a smooth movement on your beautiful potty.” He gave piano lessons to Josephine, the daughter of Count Clary, but the arrangement came to a sudden end when he flirted with his student, who was engaged to another man.

Hans Christian Andersen
“Of all the German towns, Prague is my favorite,” wrote the man who has sent more children to sleep than milk and honey. The author of fairytales, plays and travelogues was touring Europe in 1834 to forget Riborg Viogt, a dark-eyed beauty who broke his heart by marrying a ranger. The cure seems to have worked: In a letter written from Bohemia in August, Andersen confessed that often when he was sitting hidden in a covered carriage he often could not resist the impulse to yell out ‘Hezká holka, já tě miluji!‘ (“Pretty girl, I love you!”) when an attractive woman walked by.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky´s welcome to Prague was memorable. “At the [train station] there was a mass of people,“ he wrote. “Deputations, children with flowers, and finally two speeches, one in Czech, the other in Russian. I went to my carriage between two walls of people and cries of ´Slava!´ [‘Hooray´].” Anti-German feeling was strong in 1888, and as a result Russophilia was on the rise.

Auguste Rodin
In 1902 the French sculptor Auguste Rodin visited Prague to view an exhibition of his work at Kinsky Palace. “My humble person was so elevated for several days that I shall not ever erase the memory of it from my mind,” he wrote in a thank you letter to the Mayor of Prague. During his trip, Rodin met the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who later became his secretary. A fervent admirer of the female form, Rodin was particularly impressed by “the aristocratic beauty of [Prague´s] women, their gracious movements and robes, so charming and elegant as to put me in mind of Dante´s paradise.”

Thomas Alva Edison
Thomas Edison visited Prague in 1911 at the invitation of Emil Kolben, the Czech industrial magnate and a former colleague. Visiting Café Edison on the corner of Václavské náměstí and Na můstku, Edison asked about the name. The owner Mr Turnovský explained that the café was on the corner of two promenades, the German and the Czech. If it had a German name no Czech would come, if it had a Czech name no German would, so he named it after an international celebrity. Edison was delighted, telling Turnovský, “Your response pleases me because you are right that I want to serve all nations in the world equally, for the results of my work belong to all.” His trip ended on a tragic note when his car knocked down a twelve-year old boy, an event that Edison regretted until his death.

Graham Greene
In February 1948 the English writer Graham Greene came to Prague for a week to see his Czech publisher. His publisher was not all he saw; Greene witnessed the Czech Coup, when Soviet-backed communists seized control of Czechoslovakia. During the revolution, food and accommodation were difficult to find, so Greene and his friends gate-crashed a servant´s ball in the cellar of the Ambassador Hotel, as he recalled in Ways Of Escape, his autobiography:

We found we were not the only ones in search of food. The Venezuelan Ambassador was there dancing ponderously with the fat cook and there were other members from the diplomatic corps If this was really a revolution it seemed to me not so bad. The band played, everyone was happy, the beer flowed. After my third glass I thought of Wordsworth – “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.”

But by the end of his week in Prague Greene had begun to change his mind; he noticed “the bitter humor of defeat” in the jokes Czechs made about the fat wife of communist leader Gottwald. “But who could have foretold on that fantastic night the Slansky trial, all the Stalin horrors, the brief spring, and then Dubcek and Smrkovsky dragged as prisoners to Moscow?”

Philip Roth
In the early ‘70s novelist Philip Roth regularly visited Czechoslovakia. “I went to Prague every spring and took a little crash course in political repression,” he said in an interview with The Paris Review. His trips inspired the novella Prague Orgy, which described the corrosive effects of communism on art. “That system doesn´t make masterpieces,” he said. “It makes coronaries, ulcers and asthma.”

Visiting again in the ‘90s, after the fall of Communism, Roth found there was still one great tyrant to battle. “I can guarantee you that no defiant crowds will ever rally in Wenceslas Square to overthrow its tyranny,” he said in Shop Talk. “[It] is the pervasive, all-powerful archenemy of literature, literacy and language commercial television.”

Bruce Chatwin
In 1987, Bruce Chatwin, the English novelist and travel writer, drove to Prague in a 2CV with his wife Elizabeth. The result was Utz, the story of a mercurial Czech aristocrat whose existence is destroyed by his obsessive love for Meissen china. From Vienna, Chatwin wrote a postcard to his friend, the journalist Nicholas Shakespeare:

Whew! The grimness of Czechoslovakia has to be seen. We spent the past week in flooded, mosquito ridden campsites overrun with tourists from the DDR [Deutsche Demokratische Republik]. Not a bed to be had! In the end we dived for the luxury of the Hotel Sacher in Vienna – never mind the mice! Lovely dinner! Bruce.