Museum of Czech Music
Why is it significant?
Walk into the great hall of the Museum of Czech Music and look up. The vaults above you are clearly the vaults of a church, tall and white, with galleries running around them.
Key Facts
| Place | Museum of Czech Music |
|---|---|
| Address | Karmelitská 2/4, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08450, 14.40480 |
| Part of Walk | Prague's Secret Lesser Town: Kampa, the Devil's Stream & the Embassy Garden of 1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the great hall of the Museum of Czech Music and look up. The vaults above you are clearly the vaults of a church, tall and white, with galleries running around them. But instead of an altar there are pianos, harps, violins and strange old wind instruments, and sometimes, instead of a sermon, a concert.
This was the Baroque church of St Mary Magdalene, belonging to a Dominican monastery, completed at the beginning of the 1700s. Its life as a church was short. In the 1780s the reforming Emperor Joseph the Second closed it, along with hundreds of other religious houses, and for two centuries the building served decidedly unholy purposes, among other things as a post office and an archive. Since 2004 it has belonged to the National Museum, as the home of its music collection.
Czechs like to say co Čech, to muzikant, every Czech a musician, and in the eighteenth century it was almost true. Village schoolmasters taught music, Bohemian players and composers filled the orchestras of Vienna, Paris and Mannheim, and travellers called Bohemia the conservatory of Europe. This museum holds the evidence: instruments made in Prague workshops, and the ones Czech musicians carried around the world.
And Prague returned the favour to the greatest visitor of all. When Mozart's Marriage of Figaro was a sensation here, the city invited him to write a new opera, and on the twenty-ninth of October 1787 Don Giovanni had its world premiere in Prague, at the Estates Theatre across the river. Mozart is said to have remarked that the Praguers understood him. And the Prague Spring festival, founded in 1946, traditionally opens on the twelfth of May, the anniversary of Bedřich Smetana's death, with his cycle My Country.
Now come out and walk into the square next door, Maltézské náměstí, named after the knights who have held this corner of Prague for over eight centuries. Keep left past the palaces and follow the lane into the next square, where an old garden wall has been shouting in paint for more than forty years.