A yellow Viennese opera house of 1895, with Meštrović's best-known sculpture in the fountain outside.
The Hrvatsko narodno kazalište opened in 1895, and Emperor Franz Joseph came to do it — famously tapping in a symbolic silver nail with a small hammer, which is still in the building.
It was designed by Fellner and Helmer, the Viennese partnership that built something like fifty theatres across the Habsburg lands, so it will look familiar if you have been to an opera house anywhere from Vienna to Odesa. It is a very good example of the type: yellow, neo-baroque, with a horseshoe auditorium of around 700 seats.
The Well of Life
In front of it, sunk into the paving, is Ivan Meštrović’s Zdenac života — the Well of Life, made in 1905 when he was twenty-two.
A ring of naked figures of different ages leans inward over a circular basin, reaching for the water. It is his most reproduced work and it is much better in person than in photographs, because it is at ground level and you look down into it.
Meštrović is the towering figure of Croatian sculpture and his work is all over Zagreb — in the cathedral, in St Mark’s, at Mirogoj, and on the Green Horseshoe.
The 1895 flag-burning
The opening had a second event attached to it that Croatia remembers better than the emperor’s nail.
A group of students led by Stjepan Radić — later the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, and later still shot in the Belgrade parliament — publicly burned a Hungarian flag on the square in protest at Budapest’s rule.
They were prosecuted and expelled. It became a founding moment of Croatian student politics.
What is on
The theatre houses the national opera, ballet and drama companies, each with its own season running from autumn to summer.
The ballet is strong and has an international reputation. The opera programme is a mix of standard repertory and Croatian works — Jakov Gotovac’s Ero the Joker is the national comic opera and is worth catching if it is on.
Drama is in Croatian and is not aimed at visitors, though surtitles appear for some productions.
Practical
Tickets are cheap and available. Buy directly from the theatre.
Dress is smarter than a British theatre and less formal than Vienna. A jacket is plenty.
The interior — gilt, red plush, ceiling paintings — is the reason to go even if the programme does not appeal. There are occasional guided tours; check the site.
The square outside, formally Republic of Croatia Square, was Marshal Tito Square until 2017, and the renaming took years of argument that is not fully over.
