Amadeus | Estates Theatre — the room that heard Don Giovanni first

The opera sequences in Amadeus were not staged in a replica. Miloš Forman took his cameras into the Estates Theatre on Ovocný trh, the same green-and-gold auditorium where Mozart himself stood at the keyboard on 29 October 1787 and conducted the world premiere of Don Giovanni. When Tom Hulce's Mozart raises his arms and the Commendatore's chords fall like stone, the plaster and the sightlines are the originals.

The theatre opened in 1783, two years before the film's action begins, and it is one of the very few houses from Mozart's lifetime still standing and still working. Look at the shape of it. Three tiers of shallow boxes curl around a pit barely wider than a tennis court, so the singers are close enough to be heard breathing. Forman used that intimacy hard: half the drama of the opera scenes is Salieri watching from a box, close enough to see the sweat.

Today it belongs to the National Theatre, and the cheapest way to stand where the film stood is to buy a ticket. Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro stay in the repertoire specifically because of this room, and weekend guided tours take visitors backstage when no performance is running.

Sit in a side box on the second tier. From there you look down at the stage exactly as Salieri does, and the film's central act of listening becomes a physical position rather than an idea.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC-licensed exterior view of the Estates Theatre (Stavovské divadlo), Prague.