Notes from the road: Thomas Allen in Prague.

"The great thing about Prague is that when the Germans fled at the end of the Second World War, they launched one artillery shell--there was no bombing, because the city was too far east. The one artillery shell that they launched, as a reminder that they'd been there, hit the town hall, and that wasn't a very distinguished building. The rest of the town remains, like a great wedding cake.... The skyline has wonderful silhouettes, like the cutouts of some shadow play."

English baritone Thomas Allen has made only a few trips to the Czech capital, yet it's one of his favorite places on earth. "Prague seems to me--thank God, we should really try to freeze it and stop it from deteriorating any further--it's what Vienna should be like and sadly isn't, because Vienna didn't escape the bombers during the war. But in Pr, ague, one can imagine what Middle Europe was like before it was touched by the effects of war. I think it's a unique place, and the few times I've been there have always been very, very poignant."

Allen first visited the Czech capital in the 1980s for a recital and a performance of the Brahms Requiem, under Erich Leinsdorf, as part of Prague's world-famous Spring Festival. Czechoslovakia was still one nation then, and under Communist control. Allen recalls that "the great privilege of being there then was that ... there were no great [billboards] and placards advertising McDonald's or Kodak or anything else. It was the city that was seen in the film Amadeus [from 1984, in which Prague stood in for eighteenth-century Vienna]. You saw it in its raw state, not in any contrived way, but that was the way it had always been. And it was extraordinary to see, in the late-twentieth century, a city as important as that, looking like that."

Nowadays, he says ruefully, "It's a rather sad reflection that what [the West was] able to offer seems to have been casinos and strip clubs, as an advancement on what they already had. And the advertising, also. Yet it still retains its greatness as a city."

His first encounter with Prague audiences made a lasting impression on him. "Because they didn't have decent television, or television hadn't actually diseased their minds, the Spring Festival was still extremely important. It was expensive for them, because the top tickets were something like ten dollars at that time. But for this important festival, they still came--and came in droves. They were hanging off the chandeliers for the Brahms Requiem, I remember, and they never moved. They just sat and concentrated and listened, in a way that the vast majority of us have lost."

Allen is perhaps the most acclaimed Figaro Almaviva of his generation, and his urbane Don Alfonso delighted audiences at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last spring. He made his latest trip to Prague to film a documentary about another of his celebrated Mozartean roles: The Real Don Giovanni (1999). Prague was the site of Don Giovanni's premiere, at the Estates Theatre in 1787, and Mozart was hugely popular there, in his lifetime and ever after. "I don't feel particularly close to Mozart in Salzburg," he says, "but I do in Prague. Prague is more genuine, I think. You get closer to the heart of him somehow."

Part of the documentary film involved a bit of detective work: assessing the degree to which the libretto of Mozart's opera was influenced by the legendary lover Giovanni Casanova, who spent his last years near Prague, in the Castle of Duchcov. Allen is still fascinated by the research he did for the film. "The overriding impression is that when you start to ask people about Mozart or Don ...