Play Mozart! Innovative Mozart-themed museum opens in heart of Prague
Recently opened in Malá Strana, the Mozart Interactive Museum offers visitors a unique experience, using up-to-date technology and innovative styles of presentation to tell visitors about the life of the Prague-loving musical maestro Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Danny Bate took a tour with its director, Eva Velická.
Well situated on Malá Strana Square and therefore on the popular route between Charles Bridge and Prague Castle, a new museum has opened to celebrate the life of a musical genius with tourists and locals alike.
Although it concerns an eighteenth-century musician and composer, and is housed in a suitably Baroque building, the Mozart Interactive Museum is anything but old-fashioned. It represents the modern face of museums, with a goal to engage visitors through the latest technology and a new spin on historical content. I went along to the museum to have a private tour with its director, expert musicologist Eva Velická.
To start off, we discussed the creation of the museum – who came up with the idea, and who contributed.
“It was Jakub Bechyně, one of the owners of the museum, who had this idea to transform Mozart’s story into an interactive museum. A lot of artists and scholars then joined the project and developed it."
From the outset of the route around the museum, the interactivity is clear; rather than being protected behind glass, the exhibits invite visitors to try them out. As Dr. Velická explains, this interactivity is part of the museum’s whole raison d'être, but also a response to the lack of historical artefacts currently in the museum’s ownership.
“This museum should be for everybody. We have no collection connected to Mozart, and it’s also not your typical ‘house museum’, because Mozart did not live in this house. We wanted to tell the story of Mozart in Prague without having a collection, so we’ve done through this interactivity – you can play as or become Mozart!
“I’m a musicologist, so I can say that all the texts are correct, without the mistakes that can normally be found on the Internet. Everything is correct, and you can also enjoy the interactivity, so normal people who don’t know much about Mozart can enjoy it too. It’s important that they learn that Mozart was in Prague – if that’s all, I would be happy with that!”
It is a fair assumption that people may not know about the role of Prague in the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; he is more typically associated with the country of Austria and the cities of Salzburg and Vienna. What then is the connection between Mozart and the Czech capital that the new museum tries hard to highlight?
“Mozart visited Prague several times, actually five times. He was very fond of the city, and people here loved him. When he first came to Prague, he was stunned that people on the street and in front of the theatre were singing melodies from the Marriage of Figaro. Even a harp player on the street was playing a melody from his operas, and people were dancing to them at balls.
“Because he was so loved here, he got an offer to write an opera for a Czech theatre (at that time the Nostitz Theatre, now the Estates Theatre). This is how the opera Don Giovanni was written – this opera of operas was written for Prague.”
The museum proceeds chronologically. It begins with Mozart’s childhood and his tours around Europe as a child prodigy, managed by his father Leopold. This included a famous performance for the imperial family of Maria Theresa and her husband Francis I, and the museum’s visitors can experience this demanding audience for themselves! A ‘live’ painting of the empress and her family that reacts positively or negatively to your conducting skills is one of the many interactive exhibits available to try, close to a piano that uses lights to show visitors how to play.
The Mozart Interactive Museum can also adapt to visitors’ linguistic preferences. Using a system of QR codes, the exhibits can switch between Czech, English, German and Italian, with more language options on the way.
“You get the programme in your language, you scan the QR code, and then you will hear the story … In Czech, Mozart’s father was performed by Karel Dobrý, quite a famous actor, but in other languages, there are no actors. It’s AI.”
Uses for Artificial Intelligence appear throughout the museum; it offers to turn a picture of you into a ‘musical genius’, rendering your portrait in the dress and style of Mozart’s day. Visitors can also try their hand (or rather, hands) at conducting. Donning a virtual-reality headset, a CGI orchestra teaches you the essentials of conducting, before evaluating your attempt with a rating out of five.
As well as integrating the latest technology, very creative thinking has gone into the way the museum presents Mozart’s work. Small cinema booths screen short re-imaginings of his operas, with the plot of Don Giovanni performed as a black-and-white film noir, and Così fan tutte turned into a retro video game. This removes some of the prestige and highbrow connotations of opera, and presents visitors with how so much of Mozart’s work would have been perceived when it was first performed – as popular entertainment and fun!
Dr. Velická also spoke about a more recent connection between Mozart and Prague: the 1984 biographical film Amadeus, directed by Miloš Forman and filmed on location in Prague and Kroměříž. While very successful and much loved, the film also popularised some myths about Mozart’s life. I asked Dr. Velická whether the museum is interested in correcting those inaccuracies:
“Yes, definitely, for example this story about Salieri. He was not Mozart’s enemy, he didn’t hate him or struggle against him. Salieri was in a different position; he was the court’s master of the chapel choir, so he was number one. Salieri liked Mozart, and when Mozart died, he helped his widow and taught his son.
“It’s not our goal to struggle against the myths in the film. But now we are discussing the rights for Amadeus, and downstairs we would like to display some excerpts from the film, to say that this is also part of the history of Mozart and Prague. In the 1980s, it was really a big thing here, how, during the period of Communism, the whole team came from America and shot the film… It’s interesting, and we want to say that there is this film that’s connected to Prague, and that we tell the story in a different way.”
The team behind the Mozart Interactive Museum are already planning and making changes to its exhibits, and I was given a sneak peak of a new room that will recreate a salon of the Betramka villa, and that is not yet ready for the public. After all, it is still early days for the museum:
“It’s been open for one month; we opened in the second half of December. Of course it takes time to attract visitors and to let people know that we are here, as this new museum in Prague. But it’s starting to be known. Already quite a lot of school groups are interested in visiting us, so we prepare some workshops for them. We are also open for tourists from all over the world. We need people, because we are a private museum – we don’t get any donations from the state, which is unusual in the Czech Republic – so we need to communicate with our visitors, get to know them and prepare an interesting programme for them. It will take time, but we are happy with the positive reactions.”
The team have plans to integrate live music into the life of the museum through a programme of concerts and an offer for local music students:
“We have an offer for students of the Music and Dance Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts and of the Prague Conservatoire. They can come here for free and just practise. They wouldn’t need to pay for a rehearsal room, and we would have live music. We would like to try it, and for them it would be interesting to practise in a hall, not in a small room!”
All in all, the Mozart Interactive Museum is a fresh take on how to present history to a general audience, and is an engaging Prague-themed addition to the cornucopia of attractions that Prague can offer its visitors.
