On 29 October 1787 Mozart stood in a theatre in Prague's Old Town and conducted the first performance of Don Giovanni. In 1983 a film crew lit candles in the same room and shot the premiere of Don Giovanni, and the Vienna opera house on screen is that theatre. The National Theatre, which runs the building, tells the 1787 story on its own history page and never mentions the film. No other place in this film is playing itself.
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places on the route
Sixteen of the places are inside 1.5 km of central Prague; the château is 260 km east — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Everything else on this page is a stand-in, and none of it is Austrian. No source we found puts a single day of this production in Austria. The Czech state film office's card for the film keeps a field for what its Czech locations represent, and the value in that field is Vienna. The reasons given are practical ones. Vienna by 1983 had neon at street level and prices to match, and Czech Television's account of the shoot makes the point about ground floors: that is where the modern city showed. What Prague had in early 1983 was run-down cobbled lanes in Malá Strana, plus, by the same account, corners where the camera could turn a full circle and catch nothing modern. Michael Hausman, the executive producer, reduced it to lanterns: stand up period ones and you could roll. Prague was also several times cheaper than Vienna or Budapest, the other two cities the production looked at.
So the film's Vienna is a handful of streets in Malá Strana and Hradčany, its imperial court is a château 230 km east in Moravia, its madhouse is a derelict military hospital in Karlín, and its pauper's grave is the burial ground of a Prague asylum. Some of it you can walk into for nothing, some of it is an embassy, and the two places the film ends in are the hardest to reach of the lot. The shoot ran from January to July 1983.
The auditorium of the Estates Theatre from the back of the stalls. Mozart conducted the world premiere of Don Giovanni from this room on 29 October 1787, and Forman staged the premiere scene in it in 1983.
The theatre from Ovocný trh. The banner over the entrance advertises Figarova svatba — The Marriage of Figaro, which the film also premieres here and which is still in the repertoire.
Most of the film's opera scenes were shot in this house, and the Don Giovanni premiere is the one the crew came for. Dozens of firemen were on duty for the burning candles, the costumes and the wigs, and the theatre's own old wooden scenery was still in the wings. Forman has told the story of bringing his screenwriter in to see the place and then losing him: Peter Shaffer was in a corridor, crying, having just been told what had happened on the spot where he was standing. On 4 July the unit let an American flag down from the chandelier, a detail Czech Television has from Daniela Retková, who assisted the choreographer Twyla Tharp on the film.
The room you can buy a ticket for is probably not the room in the film. The theatre closed for a full reconstruction after the shoot, and Czech Wikipedia, without citing anything, says the auditorium went from white, gold and red to white, gold and blue during that work, with Forman getting his scenes in just before. It is blue now. We have not found a second source for the red.
It is the second stage of the National Theatre and it plays a lot of Mozart, Figaro included. Ten years later Immortal Beloved put Beethoven on the same stage. That is not the only thing those two films share; see Kroměříž below.
Vienna on foot
Nosticova, Malá Strana
Nosticova from the Hellichova end. Salieri's cry that opens the film comes out of a window in this street; no source says which one.
The film opens on a dark street under snow with old Salieri's voice coming out of a window, and the street is this one, a short lane between Hellichova and Maltézské náměstí. Which window is not established. No source we found gives a house number, and the number that circulates online traces back to fan aggregators.
The scene is set in winter, and the crew expected to have to lay artificial snow. Then snow fell on Prague unannounced, and the American actors were in the city within a few days.
The empty street in the finished opening is salvage. Michael Chandler, who cut the film, told the Guardian in 2023 that Forman asked him to fix a beginning that was too obvious, and that he went looking and found a few seconds of empty cobbled Prague streets nobody had meant to use, and ran Salieri's voice over them.
Maltézské náměstí, Malá Strana
Maltézské náměstí, the square the production filled with a Viennese market. It now works largely as a car park.
The Vienna market Mozart walks through was built on this square. It is a public square with the church of Our Lady beneath the Chain on it, and it works today mostly as a car park hemmed in by palaces.
Mozart marries Constanze here. From the street it is a Gothic box with a plain tower and gives nothing away; inside it is a Dominican priory church with ceiling frescoes by Václav Vavřinec Reiner, who is buried under them. It is open for services and generally between them.
Nerudova, Malá Strana
Nerudova today. Mozart hires his carnival masks in this street in the film; the sources are unanimous that the street's attraction in 1983 was that it had no shops and no tourists.
Mozart, his wife and his father hire the masks for the masked ball in a shop on this street. A Prague daily's location series says the interior used is now a tea room, with a memorial plaque and Forman's signature in it. That is the only account we found of the shop, and it gives no house number, so we cannot send you to a door.
Nerudova today climbs to the Castle between shopfronts and is one of the busiest walks in the city, which is the reverse of what brought the production here.
The drunken Mozart's walk home from the party starts in this passage. It goes through the Hartig Palace off Malostranské náměstí and it is open to walk through. One newspaper account names it; nothing else we read mentions it at all.
Thunovská, Malá Strana
Thunovská in 1914, printed with its own caption: 'A view into Thunovská street in Malá Strana'. This is close to what the crew came for — the same lane, empty, before cars.
Photo: Anonymous, possibly Jan Štenc (1871-1947), graphic designer of this book · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The middle stretch of that walk, from the passage up towards Hradčany. Thunovská runs from Sněmovní to the New Castle Steps and has the British Embassy on it. A photograph from 1914 shows it empty, unparked and unshopped, with its caption printed into the picture. That is close to what the production came to Prague for sixty-nine years later, and closer than anything you can photograph there now.
The walk ends at Mozart's front door, which the film puts on the square outside the gates of Prague Castle. The Castle itself was never on offer. CzechTourism's account has Forman asking to shoot inside the complex, where Gustáv Husák then had his seat, and the Barrandov management telling him to forget it at once. The unit worked under state security observation throughout, and Forman gave an undertaking not to go looking for dissidents; Tom Hulce, who played Mozart, told the Guardian they were watched constantly.
The square is the Castle forecourt and crowded for most of the day. The Sternberg Palace on it holds the National Gallery's old masters.
In 1983 a Newsweek reporter watched a scene being prepared on this street: Salieri riding in a carriage, played by an F. Murray Abraham the magazine still had to introduce to its readers. Czech Television retells that report. We have not seen the original and we do not know whether the scene is in the finished film.
The street runs west out of Malostranské náměstí. The United States embassy is on it.
The state film office lists the bridge among the film's Prague locations. No source we found names a scene on it, and the film gives you little to hunt with: in the same location series, the film historian Petra Mandová points out that the film never once shows a panorama of Prague. The pin is here because the office's card puts it here. What the bridge does in the picture, we do not know.
The court
Archbishop's Château, Sněmovní náměstí 1, Kroměříž
The Assembly Hall at Kroměříž, the largest of the rococo state rooms. Interiors like this one stood in for the imperial court in Vienna.
The imperial court is 230 km east of Prague, in Moravia, and the château names its own scenes: the rooms where Salieri and the Emperor Joseph II first meet Mozart, and where Mozart is presented to the Cardinal. The American crew had the building for fourteen days in 1983. Residents and students of the town worked in the crowd scenes, and the ones who were not in them tried to get a look over the walls at the film stars. The rooms play the imperial court in Vienna. Which Viennese palace they are standing in for is not something we could establish.
Mozart never came to Kroměříž. Some of his music did, and is still here: the château's music archive holds a manuscript of his for two pianos.
The château and its two gardens are a UNESCO site and open on guided routes, with the Assembly Hall and the picture gallery on the standard one. Its own filmography puts this film in a table with Immortal Beloved, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, A Royal Affair, Napoléon, The Musketeers, Maria Theresa and Angélique. Immortal Beloved is the one that closes a circle: the Mozart film and the Beethoven film used this château and that theatre stage, both of them, ten years apart.
Wallenstein Garden, Letenská 4, Malá Strana
The sala terrena in the Wallenstein Garden, with benches set out for a concert. The film has Mozart perform before the Emperor in these gardens; the Senate still puts concerts here in summer.
Mozart performs before the Emperor in a palace garden, and this is the garden: fourteen thousand square metres behind a wall in Malá Strana, second in size in the centre of Prague only to the Castle gardens. The open hall at one end of it, the sala terrena, still takes concerts in summer, which is what the film has it doing. English Wikipedia puts Immortal Beloved in these gardens too, rather than in the palace.
It belongs to the Senate and costs nothing: 07:00 to 19:00 on weekdays, from 09:00 at weekends and holidays. Peacocks live in it and dogs are not allowed. The Senate permits photography for private purposes only, so the next crew that wants it will have to ask.
The palace behind that garden has been the seat of the Senate since 1996. One source gives it a scene, and the scene is not a Viennese one: the child Mozart playing in Rome in front of the Pope. Czech Television counts the building among the Malá Strana and Hradčany palaces Forman used for balls and rulers' residences, without saying which room did what.
Archbishop's Palace, Hradčanské náměstí 16, Hradčany
The Archbishop's Palace on Hradčanské náměstí. Czech Television lists it among the palaces used for the film's balls and rulers' residences; the English page of the Czech Film Commission calls it the Gryspek Palace.
The palace on the same square as Mozart's film address. Three sources put the production inside the archbishop's residence and not one of them names a scene. The state film office's English page calls it the Gryspek Palace, which is worth knowing if you go searching. It is the archbishop's seat rather than a museum, and we did not establish what access it gives.
Buquoy Palace, Velkopřevorské náměstí 2, Malá Strana
Czech Television's list of the film's ball and residence palaces has this one in it. No scene is attached anywhere we looked. The French Embassy has held the building since 1919, so the inside is out of reach; the front of it stands on a small square a minute from the Lennon Wall.
Grand Prior's Palace, Velkopřevorské náměstí 4, Malá Strana
Across the same square. The state film office lists it among the film's locations, no other source we read mentions it, and no scene is named. It is the seat of the Grand Priory of the Order of Malta in Bohemia and not a public building.
Veltrusy seen down a ride in its park, with a fallow deer on the grass. Czech Wikipedia puts the Amadeus filming in the deer park rather than in the house; the chateau's own filmography just lists the film.
About twenty kilometres north of Prague, in an English park with fallow deer in it. The chateau's own filmography carries the film, dated 1984 and credited to Miloš Forman, and CzechTourism says the crew went out there. Neither names a scene. Czech Wikipedia's trivia list points at the deer park rather than the house, and carries no reference for it.
The filmography that carries this film runs to some forty titles between 1921 and 2024, Doctor Zhivago and The Red Baron among them, so whatever this film did here, it was one visit among many.
The end of the film
Bohnice Asylum Cemetery, Prague 8
The main path of the Bohnice asylum cemetery. Burials stopped in 1963 and the ivy took it; Mozart's pauper funeral was shot here in the rain.
Mozart's body goes into a common grave in the rain, and the grave is six kilometres north of the Old Town, in the burial ground of the Bohnice asylum, known as the cemetery of the mad. It took the hospital's dead from 1909 until 1963 and has been shut since. Ivy has taken most of the graves, a small number of headstones are left, and the chapel, burned by vandals in 1989, is a shell. Guided tours go in at night now and then. There is otherwise no getting in.
Worth knowing if you go looking: the Czech Wikipedia article on the film sends this funeral to a different asylum cemetery, at Horní Beřkovice. Two Prague dailies, the public broadcaster and the cemetery's own account say Bohnice.
The Invalidovna from Vítkov hill: a 1730s military hospital of pink stone marooned among the new office blocks of Karlín. What was built is about a ninth of what was designed.
The last thing the film shows is a corridor with Salieri being wheeled down it after his conversation with the priest. The corridor is under three kilometres east of the theatre where the film's Mozart conducted, inside a hôtel des invalides built between 1731 and 1737 as a home for disabled soldiers. Roughly a ninth of the designed building was ever put up, and that ninth stands in pink stone among the new office blocks of Karlín.
The theatre closed for reconstruction after the crew left and came back a working opera house. The Invalidovna is still in the queue for the same thing. It was in poor structural shape for decades before the flood of August 2002 made it worse, opened to the public for the first time in decades over a heritage weekend in September 2009, and went to the national heritage service in May 2018, which has a reconstruction in preparation. Crews kept coming in the meantime. Hellboy used the building in 2004, and in 2023 Robert Eggers took Nosferatu down the same corridors.
