Over the weekend we staged a special Baroque concert outdoors on the colonnade in Karlovy Vary. We set out twenty old spa bathtubs so people could lie down in them while listening to the music. Some were filled with thermal water from a local spring. Others with feathers, herbs, or ivy. I wanted to fill one tub with nothing but Becherovka. The lucky person could then sink into the Becherovka and continue the curious procedure by moving to the neighboring tub filled with feathers. Well—enough crazy ideas.
Most visitors simply stood around. But one brave couple walked through town to the colonnade in bathrobes and swimming caps. In the tub they even lit a cigar. Another girl in a straw hat immersed herself in the water wearing a white dress. To feel the forty-five-degree water delight the whole body. Trees and birds all around. And a Baroque trio.
We tried it as an experiment. You place bathtubs around, and people—especially into the dry ones—spontaneously lie down and marvel. Perhaps it will become a tradition. What could be more typical for the people of Karlovy Vary? Anywhere else it wouldn’t make as much sense. In Ostrava we’d have to use miners’ coal carts instead of tubs, filled only with heated water.
The idea of “musical baths” arose six years ago when a musician friend and I were thinking about what extraordinary concert to stage at our Lucerna Rooftop. In slang he quipped that Adam Plachetka could sing the Johndovany. That’s what they jokingly call Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, which he composed and premiered in Prague. And so Plachetka sang for us, and people could lie in bathtubs while they listened. Back then we practically bought up all the village tin bathtubs on the classifieds.
And from Johnadovany came Karlovy Vany. And we learn something every time. They say that a hundred years ago in Vary some surrealists were “kicking the sky.” Perhaps in such places time, ideas, and imagination flow differently.
A column for the latest issue of Reflex magazine. Photos by NikStar—thank you. And thanks for co-organizing to the Office of Architecture of the City of Karlovy Vary and to the City of Karlovy Vary.