In his pioneering 1924 study of Dvořák, Karel Hoffmeister described the Prague National Theatre as ‘our one artistic hearth’.¹ Hoffmeister’s epigram could apply as appropriately to the Prague Provisional Theatre in relation to the crucial years of the Czech national revival.² When it opened its doors on 18 November 1862, the Provisional Theatre’s overriding purpose was to provide a stage for opera and, within just a year of its opening, operetta, and plays exclusively in Czech. In the twenty years of its existence,³ the theatre, modest in size and resources, saw the premieres of seven of Smetana’s eight completed operas and the first six of Dvořák’s eleven operas along with signal works by Šebor, J. N. Škroup, Blodek, Bendl, Skuherský, Rozkošný, Hřímalý, Fibich and Nápravník, comprising in short, the foundations of Czech national opera.

The problem for the growing Czech-speaking population of Prague, drawn to the city by burgeoning employment prospects in the early decades of the nineteenth century, was not a lack of will to build cultural institutions but the difficulties of making these aspirations concrete. Prague was still at this stage a majority German-speaking city, as it had been for nearly two hundred years, and unsurprisingly the developmental infrastructure needed for creating an establishment in which to perform operas and plays in the native language was slow to develop.

The economic circumstances of the Czech lands had been improving markedly through the early decades of the nineteenth century with investment in mining from Paris and Vienna leading to a systematic exploitation of the mineral riches of Bohemia and Moravia. The drift of the rural Czech-speaking population to find work in majority German-speaking Prague inevitably led to a shift in the capital’s demography. The financial circumstances of the incomers were further advanced by the abolition of guild monopolies in 1859. The removal of trade tariffs between Hungary and the Czech lands, resulting in the importation of cheap corn, certainly created economic difficulties in the countryside, but it further intensified industrial prosperity in the towns and cities. By the 1870s Prague had become a majority Czech-speaking city with consequent pressure for native cultural institutions of which opera in Czech had to become a major feature.

In fact, opera in Czech, if not a regular feature, had been a presence in Prague’s musical scene some decades before. Die Zauberflöte, for example, was given in Czech as Kouzelná píštála (the Magical Whistle) as early as 1794,⁴ and translations of standard repertoire were becoming more frequent from the 1830s onward. In the years leading up to the opening of the Provisional Theatre, plays and opera in Czech were allowed in the German Theatre at Sunday matinées and occasionally on weekdays (usually Thursdays).⁵ The concept of a building dedicated to performances in Czech dates back to discussions among the city’s cultural leaders as early as 1844. A petition, ironically, though inevitably at this stage written in German, for a parcel of land on the banks of the Vltava was submitted by the great Czech historian František Palacký to the Bohemian Diet on 19 January 1845.⁶ Notwithstanding a high-minded vision, events proceeded at a leaden pace not helped by revolution in 1848. At its most grandiose, as advocated by Palacký, the theatre was to seat two thousand five hundred and would accommodate a concert hall, restaurant, café and meeting rooms. However, when the Czechs were victorious in the 1861 municipal elections, the result was driven by conservative caution, and a rather modest ‘Provisional’ Theatre was proposed. Designed by Ignác Ullmann, previously responsible for the Czech Savings Bank and the Lažanský Palace, including Slavia, the coffee house, all located at the end of Národni Třída (National Boulevard), the theatre was built in six months on the site of a salt warehouse on the embankment of the Vltava just over the road from these buildings.

The opening, on 18 November 1862, was resplendent with a Festive Overture (Slavnostní ouvertura) by Hynek Vojáček and the premiere of a five-act tragedy, King Vukašín, by the respected young writer and member of the Provisional Theatre’s board, Vítězslav Hálek. The theatre’s operatic debut came two nights later with a gala presentation of Cherubini’s Les deux journées performed in Czech under its alternative title, Le porteur d’eau (Vodař in Czech). Cherubini’s opera, while popular in the nineteenth century in Prague, exposed the glaringly obvious fact that there was no body of Czech operas nor any signal native masterpiece to launch the musical repertoire of the Provisional Theatre. The first Czech offering was František Škroup’s modest Singspiel Dráteník (The Tinker) of 1826, given on 8 December; while the work was held in considerable affection by audiences, not least because of the inclusion of the song ‘Where is my home?’ (‘Kde domov můj?’), which much later became the Czech national anthem, its appearance was hardly the resonant beginning of a national school.⁷

The conventional operatic repertoire, unsurprisingly, reflected local capabilities and, inevitably, the taste of the musical directors.⁸ Under the first, Jan Maýr, a conductor with a wide range of experience, the bias was towards the Italian romantic repertoire. French opera, while less frequent, was represented by a broader range of composers, including Auber, Halévy, Méhul, Meyerbeer, Boieldieu and Offenbach. Balfe’s Bohemian Girl enjoyed a brief vogue in 1863 and 1864 with nine performances, although its title was discreetly changed in Czech translation to Cikánka (The Gipsy Girl). German opera was represented by Mozart, Weber, Lortzing and Flotow. The arrival of Smetana as musical director at the beginning of the 1866 to 1867 season secured the position of French grand opera; even after his withdrawal from the theatre in 1874, owing to deafness, it remained an important feature of the repertoire with Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots and Robert le diable, Auber’s La muette de Portici, Halévy’s La Juive and Rossini’s Guillaume Tell leading the field. In 1882, the last year of the Provisional Theatre, thirty-one performances were of French grand opera, and only twenty-three were by the Italians Bellini, Donizetti and Verdi. Twenty-four of the performances were accounted for by Beethoven, Flotow, Gluck, Lortzing, Mozart and Tchaikovsky, and thirty-nine were of operas by Czechs. The remaining seventy-nine performances, however, were of operetta, which means – if one includes the nine performances of Anger’s Záletníci (The Philanderers) and Hřímalý’s Zakletý princ (The Enchanted Prince), both of which were described as operettas on their posters – approaching half the performances of this final year of the theatre’s existence were given over to operetta. This was not a novel trend.⁹

Operetta entered the Provisional Theatre’s repertoire during its first full year on 13 December 1863 with Offenbach’s Orphée aux enfers, which remained a popular part of the repertoire, notably in the summer months, and was given new productions in 1868 and 1873. This was but the start of a marked trend towards operetta as an intrinsic part of the theatre’s repertoire. Orphée was joined in 1865 by Le mariage aux lanternes and La chanson de Fortunio, and almost year on year new premieres of operettas by Offenbach were added to the repertoire. While Orphée remained popular, both Les brigands and La princesse de Trébizonde surpassed it in numbers of performances (see Table 5.1). Hopp, Lecocq, Planquette, Johann Strauss Jr and Zajc all proved popular in the period, but Offenbach was undoubtedly the leader in the field where operetta was concerned throughout the existence of the Provisional Theatre.

Orphée met with critical enthusiasm as the pseudonymous critic, -l-, of Slavoj noted: ‘[its] high-spirited humour will certainly win an abundance of admirers’.¹⁰ A more philosophical tone was struck by the writer and critic Jan Neruda in August 1864, who speculated that operetta might be a much more natural genre for the enjoyment of audiences essentially more attuned to folksong and national farce. As will be seen below, the response of the management of the Provisional Theatre in many ways reflected the thrust of Neruda’s speculation and also to an extent the original intentions of those who had framed the competition rules for new repertoire in 1861 (see later in this chapter).¹¹

In 1872, the midpoint of the theatre’s existence, when Smetana was still its musical director, seventy of the one hundred and seventy-six performances were billed as operettas. Thirty-eight of these were by Offenbach (La princesse de Trébizonde, Les brigands, Le mariage aux lanternes and La boule de neige), and the majority of the rest were by Hopp and von Suppé. In fact, between 1870 and 1874, on the basis of these statistics, the most popular composer in the Provisional Theatre was not Smetana or even Verdi, who had made an extremely good showing in the late 1860s, but Offenbach. 1875 marked the high-tide mark for operetta, with one hundred and eighteen out of one hundred and ninety-one performances given over to the genre. It was also the year in which Lecocq eclipsed the popularity of Offenbach with forty-seven performances to the latter’s thirty-seven. Nevertheless, the sheer extent of performances of operettas by Offenbach was a prime characteristic of the repertoire of the Theatre; if none of his works achieved the volume of Gounod’s Faust, at one hundred and fifteen performances, or Smetana’s The Bartered Bride at one hundred and sixteen, they were among the most consistently successful of all musical performances in the Provisional Theatre. Although it would be unwise to assert that the audiences for Offenbach, Johann Strauss Jr and Lecocq were the same as for Smetana and Meyerbeer, the importance of operetta in the repertoire of the Provisional Theatre cannot be ignored.

Indeed, the presence and significance of lighter genres was recognized at many levels. The manifesto in support of Smetana’s musical directorship of the Provisional Theatre, signed by Dvořák and Fibich among others, sent to the Intendant František Ladislav Rieger and the Board of Directors on 17 October 1872, included the comment that ‘with Prodaná nevěsta (The Bartered Bride) he [Smetana] laid the foundations of Czech light opera, indeed it can be said that he created the style’.¹²

Underpinning a taste for operetta was a marked predilection among audiences for dance. Evenings of ballet were common and guest dancers were invited almost as frequently as guest singers, and they certainly seemed to be as popular. The pattern was set early in the history of the Provisional Theatre with the appearance on 13 December 1862 of the Spanish Ballerina Marcellina Olivera, who gave three performances of an assortment of dances before the end of the year. In March 1863 a major attraction in Auber’s La muette de Portici was the dancing of the part of Fenella by the theatre’s prima ballerina, Marie Hentzová;¹³ on the posters advertising the event during the rest of the year, Hentzová’s name was printed in bigger letters than those of her singing colleagues.

A curious climax of this adulatory tendency where dance attractions were concerned came with the appearances of the one-legged Spanish ballet dancer, Juliano Donato, in August 1864.¹⁴ Independent ballets were a rare occurrence in the repertoire, and typically Donato’s appearances came between the acts of opera. He began in Flotow’s Alesandro Stradella on 10 August and subsequently appeared at a number of performances, Rossini’s Otello, Orphée aux enfers, Lucrezia Borgia, La muette de Portici, La Juive, Il barbiere and The Bohemian Girl in the space of a fortnight. This remarkable series of performances was less a testament to Donato’s versatility than to the audiences’ delight in seeing the dancer perform virtually the same routine on each occasion. Smetana, in his role as critic for the major Czech daily newspaper Národní listy (National Pages), was withering about the decline in operatic production which the wholesale deployment of the astonishing Donato represented.¹⁵

Another feature of planning by the management was the assembly of separate acts from different operas in order to display the gifts of visiting dancers or singers. While Smetana did not approve of this practice, he permitted it to happen under his direction, if not his baton, on a number of occasions.¹⁶ Other opportunities for singing and dancing were offered in the numerous farces with musical accompaniment and spectacular eclectic productions such as Cesta kolem světa v 80ti dnech (Around the World in Eighty Days) premiered on 28 September 1876; it was described as a ‘great narrative play’ with spectacular scenes and a ‘Grand ballabile’ for the corps de ballet. To emphasize the exotic nature of the attraction, the larger-than-usual poster for the production was headed by images of a camel and a giraffe. Czech composers had a healthy respect for their audiences’ liking for ballet, the predilection for which was at its strongest in the 1860s and 1870s. Along with Smetana’s Braniboři v Čechách (The Brandenburgers in Boehmia), many of the serious Czech operas premiered in the Provisional Theatre included ballets, and all but one, the single-act Tvrdé palice (The Stubborn Lovers), of Dvořák’s operas include dance.

Surveyed as a whole, the repertoire of the Provisional Theatre could best be described as polyglot and the tastes of its audiences omnivorous. Alongside the steady tread of native serious and comic opera, for which the theatre is now chiefly remembered, was a major helping of the froth and sparkle offered by operetta and musical farces – many of them by Johann Nestroy, of which the most popular in Prague were Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus and Eulenspiegel with music by Adolf Müller I. In his lively set of reminiscences of the Provisional Theatre, Karel Šípek recounts the cramped and awkward nature of its seating; he also gave an indication of the demographic of an audience, some of whom wore rustic garb and enjoyed attractions, such as the astonishing Donato, in the intervals of operas.¹⁷ Looking just beyond the end of the Provisional Theatre era into that of the opening days of the National Theatre, a drawing of the National Theatre’s auditorium by Bohumir Roubalík from the ‘standing stalls’ quite clearly shows a gathering of men and women some of whom are in national dress.¹⁸

To some extent, the intentions of those who were keen on developing a native repertoire for the theatre had to cater for the needs of an audience which had a strong rural profile and still identified strongly with the sights and sounds of village life as numerous backcloths to Czech comic opera attest.¹⁹ In a similar spirit, Count Jan Harrach’s competition rules for new repertoire, produced in 1861, not only encouraged the use of folksong in comic opera but expressed the hope that such practices would lead to the ‘audience’s lively participation’.²⁰ While Smetana was certainly opposed to the notion of the ‘singalong’ night as an aspect integral to Czech comic opera and vehemently opposed the use of the kind of ‘medley of songs’ it might produce,²¹ he was not impervious to the potential of more demotic entertainment as a means of securing audience attention. The brilliant dances added to The Bartered Bride three years after its disappointing premiere in 1866 were certainly important in improving its fortunes with audiences. Similarly, the comedians that Smetana and his librettist Karel Sabina included in Act 3 seem a distinct nod in the direction of the more vaudevillian aspects of the theatre’s repertoire.

Elsewhere, the Offenbach style had a clear impact on both Smetana and Dvořák in comic mode, in, for example, the competitive exchanges between Karolina and Anežka in Act 2, scene two, of Smetana’s Dvě vdovy (The Two Widows) and the rumbustiously Parisian closing pages of the overture to Dvořák’s The Stubborn Lovers. Prague’s critics, not least Smetana when writing for Národní listy, had a tendency to hold their noses where operetta was concerned, but the undoubted allure of the genre, an attraction of which the management was certainly aware, across the twenty years of the Provisional Theatre’s existence cannot be discounted.

Smetana himself seems to have continued to be ambivalent about Offenbach, particularly in relation to The Bartered Bride. During a speech at a banquet held by the Umělecká beseda (Artistic Society) in celebration of the hundredth performance of The Bartered Bride on 5 May 1882, Smetana referred to the work as a ‘joke’ (žert) adding ‘I composed it, not out of vanity but out of spite, because after The Brandenburgers [The Brandenburgers in Bohemia] I was accused of being a Wagnerian and not capable of doing anything in a lighter national style. So I immediately hastened to Sabina for a libretto and I wrote The Bartered Bride. It was my opinion at the time that even Offenbach could not compete with it.’²² For all its epigrammatic quality, this statement does encapsulate the problem for the development of a native Czech operetta. Notwithstanding its dances and circus scene, The Bartered Bride was fundamentally high-minded in intent and thus transcended Neruda’s speculative aspirations for a local brand of operetta. Neither Anger in The Philanderers nor Hřimalý with The Enchanted Prince established a tradition of Czech operetta, and with The Bartered Bride, Smetana created an aspirational template for Czech comic opera that went well beyond the intentions of operetta, as Dvořák’s comedies, notably Jakobín (The Jacobin) which owes a great deal to The Bartered Bride, show.

Operetta remained a presence in the National Theatre’s repertoire from its second opening in 1883. Offenbach was by far the most popular composer joined later by Messager, Suppé and Johann Strauss Jr among others (including Gilbert and Sullivan with a staging of The Mikado). But numbers of performances were well below those sustained in the Provisional Theatre, and native operetta failed to gain traction, nowithstanding the occasional outing for Karel Bendl’s Indická pincezna (Indian Princess). This is not to say that Czech composers could not flourish in operetta’s mainstream outside the native tradition, as is attested by the huge success of the Viennese operettas of Oskar Nedbal and the American stage works of Rudolf Friml, both of whom were composition pupils of Dvořák.