The Estates Theatre

This guide to the Estates Theatre in Prague retells the frantic night before the world premiere of Mozart's Don Giovanni here on 29 October 1787, when he had not yet written a note of the overture. His wife Constanze kept him awake with punch and stories from the Arabian Nights, but he dozed off anyway, leaving copyists to rush his pages to musicians who had never rehearsed a bar of it. Two centuries later, film crews returned to this same stage to shoot much of the movie Amadeus.