Rudolfinum. The House of Artists in the true sense of the word, both in the purpose to which it is dedicated as well as in its monumental noble facade and also in its location, on a quiet corner of the Crown Prince Rudolf embankment, opposite the picturesque orchards of Letná. And it is a center of musical and fine arts especially, for, in its beautiful concert hall, the most famous Prague concerts are held and, in its halls, all the larger exhibitions of paintings are held.
The construction of Rudolfinum as a multi-purpose building, the concept of which was unprecedented at the time, was initiated by the Böhmische Sparkasse (Czech Savings Bank). Founded in 1825, the oldest monetary institution in the Czech Kingdom decided to celebrate its 50th anniversary by donating 400,000 guldens to an as yet unspecified charitable cause.
The then director of the institution, Sir Wenzel Worowka, persuaded his colleagues on the board to direct the money to support the visual arts and music. The planned venture was intended to benefit all clients of the savings bank, regardless of nationality or social class. Art was considered as a common good for all people. On 19 November 1872, the general meeting of the Savings Bank approved the construction of the House of Artists and preparations for the project could begin.
A plot of land on the right bank of the Vltava river, directly opposite Prague Castle, was chosen as the site for the new building. The site, referred to as a "rayard", was then "an inner periphery where low buildings, enclosures and other structures related to wood storage, saltpeter production, and other economic purposes rose from the irregular natural bank" [2].
The transformation of the whole area began with the construction of the chain gangway between 1868 and 1869. This was followed by the purchase and demolition of the old waterfront houses and, in a few years’, the footbridge was followed by the construction of the Rudolfinum (from June 1876), the waterfront redevelopment (1878), the construction of the School of Applied Arts (1882), and the Museum of Decorative Arts (1897). In the 1920s, the building of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University completed the image of the place, this "island of art and education".
By 1873, the savings bank had decided to name the new enterprise after the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Rudolf. The building itself was intended as an expression of loyalty to the Habsburg family and the Austrian monarchy. Furthermore, the young archduke was very popular at the time. However, another member of the Habsburg family, the art-loving emperor Rudolf II, was also kept in mind when choosing the name of the building. To enhance the connection to Rudolf, it was decided the adjacent embankment and nearby chain footbridge would also bear his name.
The savings bank announced an architectural competition, inviting a number of prominent architects of the day. In June 1874, it received eight competition proposals, including a joint project by Josef Zítek and Josef Schulz. Although the panel of experts did not choose a winner, the savings bank took advantage of its privileged position as the event’s primary investor and chose the design by the Czech architects for implementation. They considered its blueprint to be the most straightforward.
Zítek and Schulz went on a study tour of Germany, France, Belgium, and England at their own expense, visiting prominent concert halls and galleries and consulting leading experts of the time on various architectural issues. In Bayreuth, they even met Richard Wagner and discussed in detail the problems of acoustics in concert halls. In April 1875, they submitted revised plans and, in May 1876, they submitted a detailed design. Nothing stood in the way of the construction.
Foundations
The excavation of the foundations began in June 1876. The foundation masonry had to be laid lower than the architects had planned, to the depth of 9 meters, i.e. 2 meters under the level of the Vltava river. The excavation work was thus prolonged until 1878, contrary to expectations.
"Digging of the foundations and pumping of water began on 23 June 1876 on the south side; the actual construction began in 1878. Four hundred workmen reached the level of the cellars in as early as August 1878, and, in November of the same year, the level of the masonry was reached."
— Dalibor, 1885 [3]
Jan Bělský, a builder, took on the project. After his death in 1880, his son Quido took over the work.
Photo: National Technical Museum.
The masonry of the first floor was completed in 1880. During the following year, the building got a roof with an iron truss. The façade was completed, heating and ventilation were installed. By the end of 1882, the interior plastering had been done, followed by the interior furnishing and the exterior decoration had been finished.
This image shows the nascent Rudolfinum with the original buildings, which, at the time of construction, served as a base for workers and a material store.
Photo: Jindřich Eckert, Prague City Archive
The architects suppressed the unity of the building in terms of mass and appearance in favor of two functionally divided parts – the concert hall and art gallery. The architects oriented the façade of the concert section with a raised barefoot ground floor to the south (towards today’s Jan Palach Square), separated from the other floors by a cordoned cornice, divided with Ionic columns and finished with a balustrade decorated with vases and sculptures of esteemed musicians. The same façade decoration was then applied to the gallery part of the building whose northern façade is dominated by monumental corner towers, thus visually unifying the two parts.
Photo: Prague City Archive.
The Rudolfinum opening ceremony was scheduled to take place on 24 January 1885, but was postponed due to the Crown Prince Rudolf’s illness. In the end, the savings bank decided to hold the ceremony on 7 February 1885, even though Rudolf was still unable to attend (he did not see the building until April). Nevertheless, the opening ceremony was a great event. In the presence of the director of the savings bank, the two architects and the Prague honorarium, the guests toured the old masters' Picture Gallery, the halls of the Museum of Decorative Arts with everything culminating in a gala concert. The first piece performed was Ludwig van Beethoven's Consecration of the House.
Yet the Czech press was initially ambivalent about the opening of the new cultural showpiece, completed only shortly after the National Theater. While journalists hailed the "beautiful palace" and "monumental building", they also complained that few Czech artists participated in the opening ceremony and the lack of Czech compositions performed. The escalation of national disputes over Rudolfinum came in 1891, along with a competition to decorate the hitherto empty spaces of the hall. Prominent Czech-speaking painters were upset that the savings bank did not grant them exclusive status, and that the jury included too many professors from the Vienna Academy. They therefore refused to enter the competition. Of the fourteen designs eventually submitted, three were selected as winners, but they never materialized. The walls of the hall were therefore without artistic decoration and would remain so.
At Rudolfinum, in the ’house of artists’, it was so crowded an apple couldn’t fall! Across the frontal space, illuminated by arched electric lamps, reflecting sharply from the black shadows of the surrounding park, the labyrinthine ruins of the Old Town redevelopment, the gloomy crannies of the Fifth Quarter, and the ghostly arches of the iron footbridge under which streams of gushing waters were sounding, carriages rumbled and throngs of elegant spectators were rushing towards the magnificent concert hall...
After Rudolfinum was opened, it became the seat of the Picture Gallery (founded by the Society of Patriotic Friends of Arts, the predecessor of the National Gallery), the music conservatory (backed by the Unity for the Enhancement of Music in Bohemia) and the Museum of Decorative Arts (founded by the Chamber of Commerce and Trade). The Böhmische Sparkasse entered a contract with all three institutions for the free use of the building as long as they served their purpose, i.e. promotion of art. The building was also the venue for the annual exhibitions of the Art Association, occasionally supplemented by exhibitions of purely German-language art associations.
Picture Gallery of the Society of Patriotic Friends of Art
A view into the long hall of the Picture Gallery which was dedicated to Italian, Dutch, and German masters of the 16th–18th centuries.
Photo: National Gallery.
Arrangement of the individual collections as prepared by the then-administrator of the Picture Gallery Viktor Barvitius (1834–1902). This outstanding expert in European art, an active painter and art theorist himself, was the inspector of the Picture Gallery from 1877 to 1893 and was instrumental in the fundamental expansion and sorting of its collections.
Adapted from V. Barvitius:Katalog obrazárny v Domě umělců Rudolfinum v Praze. Prague, 1889.
The museum exposition was located in the column hall where we can find Cafe Rudolfinum today, and the widely visited museum library with a reading room in today's Artpark of Galerie Rudolfinum. The museum and library collections grew so rapidly from 1885 onwards that the institution's full operation soon required its own building. It was built on a plot of land "across the street" in 1897–1900.
"The rooms of the Museum of Decorative Art at Rudolfinum are absolutely insufficient for the purposes of this institute already. The present exhibition hall of the museum is 9 meters wide, 24 meters long, therefore occupies 216 m² and is so overcrowded with showcases that a more careful examination of the exhibited objects is absolutely impossible during a larger visit."
— Národní listy, 1889 [4]
Photo: cca 1908
Visitors could see not only the collections of the Picture Gallery or the Museum of Decorative Arts at Rudolfinum. The rooms overlooking the Vltava river and Prague Castle were reserved for short-term exhibitions of theBohemian Association of Art. In addition to various smaller exhibitions, the Association held the so-called Annual Exhibition every spring. This event represented the most comprehensive show of contemporary art in Prague and was of great interest to the general public.
Taken from the Český svět magazine, 1905.
The Prague Conservatory of Music, operating since 1811, used twelve classrooms within the perimeter of the Rudolfinum ground floor under contract with the Czech Savings Bank. In addition, there were two offices, an employee apartment, and a small concert hall in the raised parterre (the predecessor of today's Suk Hall) with adjoining tuning rooms. For larger events, the large concert hall was borrowed from the savings bank. The conservatory was at home at Rudolfinum until 1918.
Advertisement taken from the Dalibor magazine, 1903.
The Rudolfinum Concert Hall regularly hosted the National Theater Orchestra, the conservatory orchestra and a number of guest ensembles and soloists. On Saturday 4 January 1896, Rudolfinum also witnessed the first ever concert by the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra. Antonín Dvořák himself took the stage as conductor to his own compositions: the Slavonic Rhapsody No.3 in A flat major, the world premiere of Biblical Songs Nos. 1-5, the Othello overture and the then-world-famous 9th Symphony From the New World.
Today, then, the long-standing wish of all our musical fraternity will finally be realized; the concert period is to be enriched by a steady number of orchestral productions, a rosy perspective for the future is opening up for Czech composers, their orchestral works will no longer languish in the depths of their desks... (...) In such joyful mood, we will enter the splendid rooms of Rudolfinum today in the hope that the intentions of the philharmonic concerts were fulfilled in the most splendid way and, at the same time, were in complete harmony with the aspirations of all those for whom the flowering of domestic art is a sacred thing.
A famous quote asserts that war undermines the creative spirit. This was also true for Rudolfinum which, during the war, became an infirmary for wounded soldiers. The muses did not return here after 1918, however. With the new republic came the need to find suitable premises for the National Assembly’s Chamber of Deputies. And Rudolfinum proved to be the best possible choice.
It was occupied by the state administration together with the adjacent building of the Academické Gymnázium High School (today the seat of the Prague Conservatory) on 1 September 1919. The two buildings were connected by a bridge in the same year, operational until the reconstruction in the early 1990s. The adaptation of Rudolfinum itself took place intermittently between 1919 and 1932, mainly under the direction of architects Václav Roštlapil and Rudolf Kříženecký, and involved considerable changes to the functionality and appearance of the interiors in particular.
In the first phase, the stage was aligned with the concert hall, and, a little later, the organ was removed. The loggias, galleries and lounges were modified. Alterations to the lobby and foyer, together with the connection between the north and east wings of the building, allowed better communication between the different parts of the Chamber. The creation of space for the facilities of the deputies' clubs and the newly established dining room led to the lowering of ceilings and to the building of partitions in the halls and rooms in the Rudolfinum gallery section.
The Chamber of Deputies met at Rudolfinum from 1919 to 1939. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was elected president of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1920, 1927 and 1934, and Emil Hácha in 1938.
Prague's Rudolfinum–the new chamber of the Czechoslovak Republic–exceeded the role of the royal castle where Czech kings were formally crowned and enthroned. The magnificent feat was relegated from the heights of Hradčany to the democratic lowlands on the right bank of Vltava, in the center of Prague, and became a symbol of the popular and democratic state.
The functional and artistic rehabilitation of the Rudolfinum was brought about–somewhat paradoxically–by the years of World War II. The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was no longer seen as a self-governing entity and there was no longer a need for a base for political representation.
Preparations for the "return" of Rudolfinum to German art had been underway since 1939. However, the opening of concert operations was constantly delayed due to costly reconstruction. It was not until 16 October 1941 that Rudolfinum was inaugurated by the acting Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich.
Although only an outline of the original plans remained, the modifications carried out between 1940 and 1942 meant that the concert hall was returned to its initial purpose–albeit for the German Philharmonic Orchestra which was active in Bohemia until 1945.
The architects Bohumír Kozák and Zítek's pupil Antonín Engel restored the function and decoration of the concert stage and hall, and also focused on improving its acoustics, which had been questioned since the very beginning of concert activity. An important creative act was the establishment of a small concert hall on the ground floor, today called Suk Hall, which corresponds in its conception and decoration to the original Rudolfinum decoration.
Music That Gives Strength
The Nazis used Rudolfinum for concerts by the German Philharmonic Orchestra and guest ensembles. In 1942, 1943, and 1944, the Prague Music Weeks festival was held here every spring.
The photograph shows a concert for Heroes' Day in 1941.
Rudolfinum also hosted various occasional events–NSDAP congresses, lectures, shows and exhibitions, such as German Book Week, and commemorative and social ceremonies. A photograph from 1943 shows one of these, a farewell ceremony for children who had been evacuated from Germany and temporarily placed in the Czech countryside before the allied air raids.
Not only the Rudolfinum interiors were to be rebuilt. Germans were going to transform the surroundings of the building as well. On 5 December 1941, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Mozart's death, the foundation stone of the composer's monument was laid in the area in front of Rudolfinum. At the same time, the former Smetana Square was renamed Mozart Square or Mozartplatz.
Foto ČTK.
The Protectorate life of Rudolfinum is nowadays mainly associated with the story of the removal of the statue of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, as it was impressively rendered by Jiří Weil in his novel Mendelssohn Is on the Roof. A literary work is one thing, historical reality is another. You can read what it was like in reality and that Mendelssohn's story is just one of the masterpieces of the novel in the article Na štřeše je Mendelssohn Jiřího Weila (only in Czech language).
Photo: Czech Philharmonic.
In 1946, the Czech Philharmonic returned to the Rudolfinum, sharing the building with the Academy of Performing Arts and the Conservatory. While the southern part of the Rudolfinum - Dvořák Hall and the so-called Small Hall - continued to be used for public concerts and musical performances, the northern part had to get used to a completely different ’art’. The Ceremony Hall was changed into a gym for conservatory teaching purposes. The majestic space resounded with commands and ping-pong ball strikes instead of artistic debates. In the late 1980s, it was considered to demolish the main staircase and build another concert hall there . Fortunately, the adaptation did not take place and the hall retained its original form.
...preparing for the performance in the Small Hall. After the warm-up in the year class, the concert followed. On the way up the staircase, it was necessary to greet passing distinguished professors in a distinctive and courteous manner, to listen to a duet of practicing trumpeters or trombonists in the men's restroom, to peer through a crack in the ballet department for inspiration, to cross a connecting bridge with two or three violinists also practicing for tomorrow's "chamber". Hold the door and respectfully greet the erect figure of professor Karel Pravoslav Sádlo’s as he passes... (...) Glance around the gym and look forward to tomorrow's rope climbing and fencing lessons with the professor and 1948 London Olympics quarter-finalist Svatopluk Skýva. Then just wait in awe in the back room under the photographs of famous quartets for the long minutes until I play.
During the 1970s and 1980s, the building's poor condition became increasingly apparent. After Rudolfinum was declared a national cultural monument in April 1989, there was an even greater need for a general reconstruction, but also for the installation of new technical equipment, air conditioning, cooling and security systems, gas boiler room, etc. The reconstruction, which took place between 1990 and 1992, was entrusted to architect Karel Prager’s team. He undertook to respect the original concept by architects Josef Zítek and Josef Schulz as much as possible.
The restoration was carried out with the utmost reverence for the monument. Even by today's standards, it is an example of a very successful reconstruction that has rarely been surpassed. The only downside was the modification of the surroundings–the construction of garages beneath Jan Palach Square, with the entrance on Alšovo nábřeží near the entrance to the gallery, with unsightly ventilation in the middle of the square. Their construction is one of the obstacles that have prevented change of the unsatisfactory appearance and functionality of Palach Square.
After its reopening on 14 May 1992, Rudolfinum was fully returned to the muses to whom it had been dedicated from the beginning. The main user of the building today is the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, while the restored premises in the northern part of the building have been used for exhibition purposes by the Rudolfinum Gallery since 1994.
Dvořák Hall
The reconstruction of the concert hall altered both its layout and decor. Due to the new cloakrooms, the elevation of the auditorium was raised, the seats were replaced and the central aisle disappeared. The stucco ceilings and column heads were restored.
Photo: Czech Philharmonic.
Behind and under the stage, technical facilities were built, headed by a service elevator for handling instruments.
Photo: Czech Philharmonic.
The main hall, which was not included in the original reconstruction concept, had also undergone a thorough renovation. It was only after strong pressure from conservationists and the cultural public that its preservation was achieved.
Photo: Czech Philharmonic.
In the 1930s, the exhibition space was divided by partitions into a series of smaller rooms. The restoration of the original condition, therefore, required a series of demolitions.
Photo: Czech Philharmonic.
Since 2012, the building has been undergoing modifications in response to the needs of domestic institutions and the development of technological possibilities. In 2016, the Suk Hall was significantly transformed, with greater versatility in the layout of the hall (mobile seating) in mind, and the acoustics of the entire space markedly improved. The sound parameters of the hall were also improved and the Cafe Rudolfinum interior was transformed. An important project economically also became an exercise in the conservation of energy, during which the Freon cooling machines were replaced by new units, and the roof over the Dvořák Hall, the auditorium and the exhibition halls insulated.
In 2018, a television studio was built to record and broadcast Czech Philharmonic concerts in 4K resolution. The studio’s operation also benefits from the modernization of stage lighting in the Dvořák Hall. The vestibule and foyer in the music areas of the building, as well as the two corner lounges, have undergone both minor and major changes. The right-hand area, closer to the Vltava river, was transformed into the Jiří Bělohlávek Listening Lounge. The left one, above the main ticket office, is now the Czech Philharmonic Souvenir Shop. The Rudolfinum roof is currently being reconstructed. The terrace should open to the public in 2023.
Sources and Literature
