The night before we left, Rehovot was preparing to end the day of mourning for the Unknown Soldier by kicking off Independence Day celebrations. Around seven o’clock, although most of the shops were closed on Herzl Street, the sidewalks were filling up with people opening ad hoc stands for selling crepes, cotton candy, drinks, all manner of Israeli flags, balloons shaped like a giant hammer with the phrase “Shield of David” stamped on them, and Israeli flag pins with blinking red lights. In front of the pharmacy I’d hoped was open, two girls were rehearsing on a giant elevated stage. When we asked the girl at the Saturday Night Cafe whether there would be a parade, she just shrugged and said she thought it would just lots of little kids singing.
Indeed, it semed as though every child over the age of four was out roaming around Rehovot with his friends, and bands of kids huddled outside the old wine market courtyard at the top of Hanasi Harishon, talking and leaping around, occasionally. Each kid was armed with a can of silly string, and, on the sidewalk, adults avoided the kids studiously.
We beat a hasty retreat home.
That, and a few late-night fireworks, was about all I saw of Independence Day. (I even missed the champagne toast on the plane).
After staying up all night, shuffling through security, sleeping as much as one can on a plane, waiting half an hour in the non-EU passport line sans EU husband, I gave up on the seasoned traveler’s number-one way of beating jet lag (taking a brisk walk), and instead took a brisk walk to bed.
“Ahoj.”
“Hello” / “Goodbye.”
Smetana Museum, Prague
Founded in 1926, the Smetana Museum lies at the southeast end of the Charles Bridge, in a building overlooking a wier on the Vltava. Before 1936, when it opened to the public, the building housed the Old Town waterworks; in 1976, it was assimilated into the national museum of Czech music.
To get to the Smetana Museum, you must pass by the terrace cafe’s yellow tablecloths, ignoring fellow tourists who appear to be downing beer at roughly the same rate as the flow of the river, as the waiters swish by in long black aprons with more towers of Pilsener Urquell. At the end of the terrace, to the right, there’s a tiny door, and the entrance to the museum, marked by a postcard stand.
The ground floor houses the cashier (in a room so small that you fear it may be the museum itself); the museum, fortunately, is spread out upstairs, over three rooms that show evidence of painstaking planning to give the viewer more than a passing introduction to one of the main beacons of Czech music.
At the top of the stairs, in the first room, a tall elderly man in a gray suit welcomed me and gave me a guide in English. His desk, spread with spiral-bound, laminated guides in four languages, had a clear view through the three rooms. A couple speaking with British accents was just leaving as I went in. On the side of the room closest to the river, there was a small raised wooden stage with four dark oak pillars, on which hung glass pages with photographs of the composer and his years growing up in Litomysil.
In the middle of this polished oak platform sat a narrow pyramid-shaped case about three feet tall. A ruby necklace, which belonged to Smetana’s first wife, lay on one level of the case. Above it, suspended on a clear thread, hung a pair of glasses, identified on a card below as “Smetana’s spectacles”. They swayed almost imperceptibly in the case, and the edges of the thumbnail-sized oval lenses, caught and curved the lines of the room as a drop of water would.
Instantly, I loved the museum and its grand presentation of the details. I took a small guilty pleasure at being the museum’s sole visitor. My only problem was in trying to navigate the numbered glass exhibit panels according to the map in the laminated guide; I couldn’t match the numbered descriptions in the guide to the real layout. Since the exhibit panels, in rich wooden frames, gave captions in both Czech and English, I eventually gave up on the guide.
The second room, oval-shaped, was filled with cloth scrolls hanging from floor to ceiling; these offered details and pictures from Smetana’s life as a teacher and composer in Prague. On one side of the room, in front of one of the balcony doors, a concert piano was positioned, and a semicircle of cushioned seats curved around it.
A woman with a pink pinafore (which made her look a little like a infant nursery attendant) crossed from the third room and, nodding to the other docent, went out onto the balcony.
I wandered into the third and last room, which seemed to be the most intriguing one: a dozen whimsically-shaped wooden music stands formed a small orchestra. Each stand, on its own little podium, was dedicated to a particular composition of Smetana’s, and held a leather folder with notes and photographs related to its premiere. A small black box that looked like a driveway lamp perched on the bottom right corner of each podium. I walked among the stands for a minute, trying to figure out what those little boxes were for, until I arrived at the stand in the front of the room, which was elevated higher than the others by at least two feet.
This, of course, was the conductor’s podium.
The pink-clad docent appeared next to me without a sound, and I jumped. She motioned for me to follow her onto the conductor’s podium, and she then lifted a thick wooden baton with a cord attached to it. As elegantly as a fairy godmother, the docent placed the baton in my hand, and pushed my thumb onto a brass button. A laser beam shot from the end of the baton to the little black box across the room on the stand for Smetana’s opera, “The Bartered Bride”. The first notes of the opera rang out from a hidden stereo system, as the bulb at the base of the stand lit up, casting a wide shadow on the ceiling.
The effect was electrifying. I beamed at the docent, and she graciously smiled and nodded back. She returned to her seat at the edge of the room, crossed her legs at the ankles, and looked out over the river.
I peered closely at the instructions printed on the podium in Czech, German, and English. For those impatient tourists sightseeing at a breakneck pace, the last line of instructions for the magical conducting baton included the gentle reprimand, “It is not possible to start another composition until the first selection has finished.”
When the lamp on the “Bartered Bride” stand dimmed and went out, and the music ended, I next chose “Libuse”, an opera whose namesake is the woman from Czech myth who foresaw the founding of the city of Prague. I played nearly every composition available, darting from the conductor’s stand out to the orchestra, to page through the leather folder for each new selection. For an hour, I was the only visitor in the museum, and, in the last room, it was as through I’d been let in secretly by the two benevolent docents. (Halfway through my tour of Smetana’s works, the first docent materialized with a watering can, and, bowing slightly with a great noble smile, proceeded to water the plants.) The last selection I played (twice) was an excerpt from “Ma Vlast”.
Leaving the museum, I paused in the second room to look more closely at one of the batons that Smetana’s Prague students had given him in appreciation; about the size of a candlestick, it was a long ivory-colored wand with two engraved silver cords twining around it, past the handle. At the tip, the silver cords crossed and blossomed into a small silver harp. It looked like a tool of enchantment, like the wand of an esteemed and powerful wizard.
Modern Art Museum, Prague
The Museum of Modern Art is in a modern glass-and-chrome building that looks out of place among the nineteenth-century facades along the rest of the street. When I got to the museum, I bought a ticket to the third floor, which houses modern Czech art and nineteenth-century French art.
Modern Czech art includes…
Frantisek Kupka’s (1871-1957) abstract paintings and black-and-white woodcuts were fascinating; he was involved in the early stages of Central European symbolism. In 1895, he settled in Paris. With Kandinsky, he was a proponent of Abstract art.
Emil Filla’s (1882-1953) “Reader of Dostoevsky” painting is reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s “Scream”; Filla’s “Goldfish on a Table” (in which the goldfish seem to squirm around in a disappearing bowl) exemplifies his move toward Cubism a la Braque, beginning in 1911.
Antonin Prochazka’s (1882-1945) still lifes…
Bohumil Kubista (1884-1918) invested his form of symbolism with meaning (according to the caption on the wall in his part of the third floor)…
Pavel Janak, Josef Goncar, Vlastislav Hofman, and Josef Capek (1887-1945) were at the forefront of the Czech design movement; a case with Cubist tea sets of stark lines and slanting sides marks the end of the Czech modern art section…
On the third floor, I was once again one of the only people in a museum; the other visitor was a Japanese girl dressed in a long, dark plaid skirt, a navy blue sweater, and a lilac-colored beret. We both moved at the same pace, though she seemed to be a serious art student, while I was just slow.
The third floor also contains the museum’s enormous collection of French art, whose purchase was commissioned by early leaders of Czechoslovakia; there are rooms and rooms of Pisarros, Picassos, Rodins, and Monets.
An Art Deco and Book Art room (from 1900-1930) and an Architecture and Scenic Design Section occupy the last part of the third floor’s collection. Czechoslovakia was the first country to apply for exhibition permits for the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris, in 1925. All the Czech exhibits won prizes, and a tour through these rooms shows why, with samples from the rich creative traditions and innovations in nearly every artistic genre.
Jan Zrzavy’s book illustrations, with their doe-eyed characters, caught my attention…
The Architecture Section opened onto another wing of the museum, from where you could look across and out at the other floors. Glass cases held specimens of modern typewriters, irons, and coffeemakers.
Troja Castle
On Friday morning, after consulting multiple maps, I headed for Troja Castle. To get there, you take the metro to Holesovice Station, and then Bus 112, but there’s no way of telling how far to take the bus; you simply have to pick out other passengers who look like they’re off for a day at the zoo (located next to Troja), and get off only when they do. It turns out that the bus terminates at Troja.
Before I’d left the apartment building, I stopped downstairs in the market, and bought some rolls, cheese, water, cookies, and two Korunas’ worth of “tourist” salami. The deli woman was incredulous at such a skimpy salami purchase, but that was all I needed for a solo picnic.
I thought I would see the botanical gardens nearby, first, so I followed a group of cheerful elderly tourists away from the zoo and up the hill until I saw a small ad-hoc cafe and a greenhouse, further up the hillside. Since admission to the greenhouse was 90 Korunas, I turned around and grumpily stomped past the tour group, heading back to Troja, where I figured I could picnic for free. In the gardens at the back of the castle (which is really a stately mansion), there was a stone fountain and lots of prim hedges, so I sat there, made my sandwich, and read about Troja, which boasts an impressive collection of Czech painting.
After my trip to the modern art museum, however, I wasn’t really ready for any more art. Nevertheless, after my picnic, I was ready to face whatever art and architecture might lie ahead.
When I went to go inside, two older men who were dressed like gardeners led me toward a bench where there were sandals laid out–the kind of slippers you put on in Prague, in someone’s house–and I started to change into them.
“No, no!” the men yelled, pointing at their feet. “OVER shoes!” I shoved my shoes back on, strapped on the leather sandals, and shuffled off, about as gracefully as if I’d been wearing swim fins. Really, I felt like pointing out that I posed much more of a hazard to the art, stumbling around the waxed wooden floors in these things, than if I’d been wearing my own shoes without covers.
In each room hung great works of Czech art, and the original frescoes of the building glowed colorfully, next to the paintings. I trudged through room after room, quickly tiring of Art. When I reached the main door, and got rid of the sandals, one of the shoe men pointed at my ticket and then across the courtyard at another wing of the castle.
“Visit,” he commanded. But all I really felt like doing was sitting on a sunny bench in the courtyard, so I did, rebelliously, I felt. Finally, I got up the strength to go across to the other wing, and it turned out to be an old, long stable (albeit a stable with a frescoed ceiling).
I went back to my bench and figured out a way to get some caffeine in my system in under twenty minutes; all I needed to do to get to Kampa Island was to take the tram from Holesovice to Ujezd. So I took the bus back to Holesovice and found a tram going to Ujezd; by the time I reached the tram stop, however, my system had given up and was now lobbying for a nap. I changed trams and headed home.
