Biography | Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Don Giovanni Opened in This House on 29 October 1787

People look for Don Giovanni first in Vienna, where Figaro had opened the year before. The first night was this theatre in Prague. The house stands on Ovocný trh in the Old Town. Count František Antonín Nostitz-Rieneck built it in 1781-83 as the Count Nostitz National Theatre. It opened on 21 April 1783 with Lessing's Emilia Galotti. The motto over the portal still reads Patriae et Musis. The building later passed to the Bohemian Estates and kept the name Stavovské divadlo. Prague had already taken Figaro in December 1786, months after a cooler Vienna run. Bondini's Italian company asked Mozart for a new opera. He arrived in the city in early October 1787 with the unfinished score. The first night was set for 14 October, then 24 October. Illness in the company and unfinished pages pushed it again. Mozart entered the work in his catalogue on 28 October: Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni, opera buffa in two acts, twenty-four numbers. The premiere was 29 October 1787. Mozart conducted from a keyed instrument in the orchestra, not from a modern podium. A small floor plaque later marked that spot. Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote the libretto. The Prager Oberpostamtszeitung reported that the composer was cheered as he entered and again as he left. Connoisseurs in the same notice said Prague had not heard its equal. Giacomo Casanova was in the city that week. Later writers have tried to put him at the table that finished the text. The documentary trail for that help is thin. His presence in Prague in late October is not. The same house premiered La clemenza di Tito on 6 September 1791, for the coronation of Leopold II. That night belongs to another memory. This pin is the first Don Giovanni. The theatre still stands. It has been part of the National Theatre since 1920. The auditorium is one of the few eighteenth-century opera rooms a visitor can still sit in. Don Giovanni remains in the repertory here. The stone on Ovocný trh is the same stone that heard the first downbeat. Photo: Che, CC BY-SA 2.5, Stavovske divadlo, Prague, via Wikimedia Commons