Mozart and Prague

Presented by the Bard Music Festival

The 2026 Bard Music Festival examines the life and times of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, the most celebrated and recognized name in classical music.

Mozart enjoyed immense popularity and personal happiness in Prague, famously declaring, “My Praguers understand me.” Marking the festival’s first all-orchestral concert, Program Three, “Mozart and Prague,” celebrates his special bond with the city. Works by his older Bohemian contemporaries Christoph Willibald Gluck and Josef Mysliveček, a one-time Mozart family friend who served as something of a model for the younger composer, will be heard alongside Mozart’s own “Prague” Symphony and the overture to his opera seria The Clemency of Titus (“La clemenza di Tito”), a work commissioned for Emperor Leopold II’s coronation in the city. Other featured works include Mozart’s first wholly original piano concerto, the Fifth, which he wrote at 17 and continued performing and revising throughout his career, and his beloved motet Exsultate, jubilate.