National Theatre

This guide to the National Theatre in Prague opens on the fire that nearly destroyed it just two months after it opened, on the twelfth of August 1881, when a workman's stove and stray gas in the pipes brought the copper dome down. It traces how the theatre had been funded not by an emperor but coin by coin by ordinary Czechs, with foundation stones hauled from sacred hilltops and even shipped from emigrants in America. Listen for the auditorium's gilded ceiling, painted and burned within weeks of its finishing.