Living the Prague Life

          We started off our adventures in Prague with a bang: listening to the Czech Philharmonic. This had to be one of my favorite concerts so far—even though I was seated neatly behind a pole for half of it. I found myself particularly interested in the fact that there were both incredibly dissonant sections and beautifully melodic sections, and because the more melodic sections were so lovely, it made the dissonant sections all that much more impactful because you know the cacophony is very much purposeful. In any case, not only was the orchestra awesome, but it also featured incredible solos. The violin soloist in particular blew my mind because it sounded like there were two violins playing—the soloist was able to harmonize with himself! I haven’t been exposed to anything like that before, and because I couldn’t see him I actually asked my classmates near me if he really was playing just by himself (he was). It was insane.

As a side-note, I have noticed that at the concerts we go to, the audience tends to applaud for a very long time, and the performers go backstage and come out again multiple times. I don’t know why but for some reason I really like this—it just makes me so glad for some reason. At the end of the Czech Philharmonic concert, the conductor did this, and when he was given a bouquet of flowers he passed out individual flowers to the female musicians, which was adorable.

Rudolfinum: Czech Philharmonic concert hall

The next day we changed up our usual schedule and went to a morning concert by the Benda Quartet. And of course, we got lost. (Granted, the name of the location on the ticket matched like three different locations, but anyway…) We were so late we missed at least one song. Some of us got in before the intermission during an applause break, but others had to wait for intermission because they were super strict on not letting people in when the performers were playing—which makes sense but was still unfortunate. This was my first experience hearing a professional quartet, and I was surprised at how different it was from an orchestral performance. The experience seemed way more personal, and I was utterly amazed at how well the musicians communicated. They didn’t have a conductor or anything, but they still managed to stay perfectly in synch. This was especially impressive during fast sections—I have no idea how they managed it, but the effect was really cool. This performance also featured chaotic dissonance and melodic non-dissonance, which was an interesting connection to the night before. To me, it seemed like this switching back and forth between chaos and melody very quickly showed off the performers’ skills—I dunno, that just seems hard to me, also purposefully sounding discordant seems like it would take a lot of skill too. Suffice it to say, I was very impressed.

I was also impressed by Prague Castle and St Vitus Cathedral. The fact that some of these buildings are far older than the U.S. never stops being cool to me. And Prague (Praha in Czech) is so beautiful! The architecture—I just… Walking around in the streets honestly feels like being in a book. (From a distance the cathedral even looks like Hogwarts). Everything is so majestic and pretty, and the buildings bear the weight of history so nobly… it’s like magic, really, how beautiful these old buildings are. (I now have a favorite historical architecture type: Gothic, of course, because it is the most fantastical.) One last comment before I end this horrendously long post—it is so awesome how the history here differs from the history of the US because of monarchy and nobility. These concepts I associate with fantasy novels are very much real here—heck, the evidence is all over the city in the form of palaces and castles. The way our Prague guide talked about dynasties and kings and how the baptism of royalty meant the official religion of the country changed... and how our guide for Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna talked about the royals living in a "golden trap" (which was why they liked paintings of peasants doing peasant things)—these are things I read about all the time, just book stuff, but here in Europe they were real life! Man, it's so cool.

St. Vitus Cathedral: