Czech Museum of Music
The Czech Museum of Music was the highlight of a day Therese, Eileen and I spent exploring Prague’s Lesser Town (or Malá Strana). We began the day by taking Tram 5 to the Malostranska stop, and from there we walked to the Franz Kafka Museum. Then we walked to the Charles Bridge and had a beverage stop at a café nestled under the bridge.
From the Charles Bridge, we then walked to the Czech Museum of Music. Since Eileen and I are both singers, I always look for a music museum when the three of us travel together (Therese enjoys those too). For example, a few summers ago when we were in Antwerp, we visited their Vleeshuis music museum, and we loved it. I was eager to see if Prague’s music museum would measure up to the high standard set for us by the splendid Antwerp Vleeshuis.
In two words: it did. Like the Antwerp museum, Prague’s music museum has audio clips featuring the exact historical instruments on display. The difference is that in the Antwerp museum, you are given an audio guide and you punch in numbers corresponding to the clips featuring the displayed instruments. Here, in each room there is a listening station in one corner with one or two sets of headphones, and a list of the audio clips available is posted on the wall. So if there are other museum visitors listening to clips in the gallery where you are, you have to wait your turn. That is the one small disadvantage to the system in Prague’s museum.
But you don’t have to be able to hear the instruments: just looking at them is wonderful, for these instruments are works of art. I was overwhelmed with the number and variety of string instruments the museum has on display: violins, violas, cellos, Baroque guitars, mandolins, theorbos, archlutes, violas d’amore, violas da gamba, violones, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten some of them. Take a look at these photos and you will see what I mean!
I am getting ahead of myself a bit. When you enter the museum, in front of you is the concert hall at the center of the building.
Concert Hall in Czech Museum of Music
To the left is the entrance to the temporary exhibit, which is where your visit to the music museum begins. When we were there, the temporary exhibit was all about Godmother Death, how music has been involved, down through the centuries, in the ways that people come to grips with death. There were folk songs talking about death, and one gallery talked about the art and music created by people in the concentration camps during World War II. There were also some early musical scores that dealt with death in one way or another – one, for example, was a chantbook or gradual opened to the mass for dead (Missa pro Defunctis).
After passing through the temporary exhibit galleries, you come out at the base of a staircase, at the top of which a museum employee checks your ticket, and then ushers you into the beginning of the permanent exhibit galleries. Ringing the entire second floor, you pass counterclockwise from room to room. It all starts with some wonderful keyboards: pianos, harpsichords, organs, even a “lautenwerk” – a harpsichord that is made to sound like a lute when it is played.
After the keyboards are the many rooms full of string instruments I mentioned above. I got bogged down in these rooms. I just couldn’t get enough of the Baroque sonatas and ricercars and such. The one thing I would’ve liked was to hear some voices included here and there. In the Antwerp Vleeshuis there are a fair number of vocal and choral-related things on display – opera scores and that sort of thing – and thus a good number of vocal clips. Here in the Prague museum I only remember there being one vocal clip, a motet for chorus and organ that featured a large organ or calliope. I wish there had been more voices.
But a minor complaint. I could’ve stayed there all day and come back the next day to listen to all the music again. Even after extricating myself from the string instrument section, there were, holy cow! lots more instruments to see. Wind and brass galore, from some of my favorite Renaissance and Baroque winds like the krumhorn, cornetto, serpent, shawm and recorder, to winds that are still used today like the oboe and its cousins oboe d’amore and English horn, and lots of brass that are used in bands, horns whose names I couldn’t even tell you.
Right at the end of the permanent exhibit they included a case or two of folk instruments. This had the effect of giving our visit to the music museum some symmetry; for the first thing I had heard when I entered had been folk songs accompanied by hurdy-gurdy, and now I once again heard that loud rustic instrument playing a Czech folk song.
Folk Instruments
When we were done at the music museum, it was already getting kind of late in the afternoon. But we had seen a restaurant off the beaten path near the bridge, an Austrian restaurant, which we thought might be a nice change from all the Czech food we’d been eating. In retrospect, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the two cuisines, but at the time it made sense to us. So we wandered back to Kocar Z Vidne, across the courtyard from an intriguing museum of film scenery and special effects, the Karel Zeman Museum. As curious as we might have been about that, we were hungry.
Like so many restaurants in touristy areas, Kocar Z Vidne has most of its seating outside, which was fine with us, since the day was quite warm (we only had one really rainy chilly day in the whole time we were in the Czech Republic). I was so hungry that I managed to eat a rather large salad and a whole plate of spare ribs washed down with yet another Moravian red wine (I had thought I might order pork schnitzel, but the waiter told me it could not be made dairy free, so the spare ribs were a respectable Plan B).
After such a full day already, it was time to get back to our hotel and have a break. That night we were on our own – I was going to have some bachelor time to explore Prague, and the ladies were going to do some shopping. I had already gotten the one thing I wanted to buy in Prague, a hat pin, which I had already attached to my hat.
My New Prague Hat Pin
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