Amadeus | Wallenstein Garden — an open-air concert under a wall of fake stalactites

A garden party, a small orchestra, powdered wigs sweating in the sun, and Mozart performing outdoors for an audience that would rather be eating. Forman staged it in the Wallenstein Garden below Prague Castle, and the setting does half the work before anyone plays a note.

Albrecht von Wallenstein built the palace and garden in the 1620s, demolishing two dozen houses and a brick kiln to make room. What he wanted was Italy in Bohemia: a triple-arched sala terrena open to the air, an avenue of bronzes by Adriaen de Vries, a carp pond, and a grotto wall of artificial dripstone crawling with half-hidden faces and animals. It is the strangest surface in Prague. Visitors still stand in front of it picking out grotesques the way they would read clouds.

The garden belongs to the Czech Senate now, and it is free to walk into from April through October. Peacocks patrol it. The bronzes are copies — the Swedes carried the originals off in 1648 — but the sala terrena, where the film's musicians sit, is the real thing.

Come on a weekday morning before the tour groups reach Malostranská. The garden is quiet then, and you can hear from the far end how sound carries out of that arched hall, which is precisely why Forman put a band inside it.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC-licensed view of Wallenstein Palace from its garden, Prague.