Prague

Only in my imagination had such a city ever existed before I traveled to Prague, city of magic, music and Mozart. We arrived under an empyreal blue sky that heightened the gold of the leaves still clinging to barren branches. The air, though crisp, was tempered by a genial sun, tinting everything it touched with magic. I have traveled on five continents and seen some of the world’s most beautiful scenery, but never had I seen a city that mesmerized me as did Prague.

“My God,” I exclaimed. In this case, it was both a prayer and a blessing.

What brought me—and the other 45 members of the Mayflower Community Chorus—to Prague was an invitation to sing in the Advent Choral Festival that took place over the course of four weeks last November and December. Even without the possibility of snow, there could be no more appropriate setting for Advent than this ancient city with its historical association to the Holy Roman Empire, and to music.

The Czech Republic, once half of the former Czechoslovakia until the Velvet Revolution that evicted the Russians, occupies center stage on the European map. Not only a crossroads of Eastern and Western civilizations, it holds a central place in Christian and Jewish religions and has been a focus of European culture since the 14th century. Midway between then and now, in the late 1700s, Prague thrice hosted the great Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, creator of more than 625 compositions, and considered the ultimate genius of Western classical music.

A virtuoso violinist and pianist by the time he was 5, Mozart toured with his equally talented sister throughout Europe, astonishing audiences with his dexterity and musicality. But as a composer, he was not always so well-received, his genius often went unrecognized by audiences that preferred lesser talents offering perhaps more approachable music. His famous opera The Marriage of Figaro, for example, was a failure in Vienna, at the time the city thought to be the ultimate in sophisticated musical taste.

Prague, however, not only welcomed Mozart as a musical celebrity, but played his music everywhere.

“They talk here about nothing but Figaro,” Mozart wrote to his Viennese friend, Emilian Gottfried von Jacquin, in January 1787. “Nothing but Figaro is played, trumpeted, sung, whistled. No other opera but Figaro is frequented. Figaro forever. It is certainly [a] great honor for me.”

But Figaro wasn’t the composer’s only piece associated with Prague. Mozart tossed off some dances for royalty, among other things, and conducted his newest symphony, later known as the Prague Symphony. In the fall of 1787 he returned to the city with his opera Don Giovanni. He finished the work while staying with friends and conducted the premiere himself in the Nostitz Theatre, now the Theatre of the Estates.

Clapping across cobblestone streets older than the United States and standing before the theater paled in splendor to singing in the Lichtenstein Palace. Dressed in concert black, our California chorus sang to a full house of Germans, Italians and Czechs, performing on the very stage where 220 years before Mozart, ‘God of All Things Musical’, had played.

Ours was just one of more than 20 musical events in the city that Saturday night. Music is as much the lifeblood of Prague as is the Vltava River, which is arched by numerous bridges, including the Charles Bridge, built in 1357 to replace the Judith Bridge which collapsed in the flood of 1342. In the evening, as twilight chills the air, the mist rises from the river and shrouds city and bridge in a magical aura. Gargoyles and statues, which adorn bridges, buildings and city squares, morph into gargantuan creatures of mythical proportions, seeming to reach from the past to pull in the awestruck. I watched the dark shapes of people, which the fog had flattened into two dimensions, and remembered Princess Libuse’s vision prophesying the founding of Prague.

“I see a large city whose fame will touch the stars!” the princess said.

Did she also see in her vision of the future a passionate writer from a remote Alaskan town come to sing in the footsteps of Mozart, and now standing on the Charles Bridge with her hand over what supposedly the Dalai Lama calls “the center of the universe?” Legend has it, if you touch each point of the star, one for each finger, and make a wish, your dreams will come true, with the added bonus that you will return to Prague.

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