Prague

Prague is linked both to a public performance that exposes the private character of Elfrieda Von Riesen’s suffering and to Yolandi Von Riesen’s fleeting fantasy of remaking her life there. The city is less a fully depicted destination than a charged point of connection: a place where music becomes a form of witness and where an imagined future briefly takes shape.

The Concert and Its Audience

Radek identifies Prague as the place where he heard Elfrieda play. Although hundreds of people were present, nobody left; he felt he should not have been in the room with her. The audience’s silence afterward, as people gathered in the bar and drank without speaking, made them seem complicit in a pain they could not fully know. In Radek’s account, the music alone knew that private suffering and held its secrets. The performance makes Prague a setting for a paradox: Elfrieda’s playing is heard publicly, yet what it communicates remains unknowable in words.

A City Imagined as a New Life

While considering Radek’s account, Yolandi imagines falling in love with him and moving to Prague with Will and Nora. She pictures a life less like her own and more like Franz Kafka’s, with the children studying tennis and gymnastics while she and Radek attend operas and ballets and become intense, poetic, and revolutionary. The scene presents Prague not as a demonstrated plan but as an extravagant possibility assembled from cultural aspiration and romantic projection.

The Fantasy’s Reversal

Radek says he would place Elfrieda in the company of Ivo Pogorelich or Evgeny Kissin, because she understands the piano as the perfection of the human voice. Yolandi answers with the image of a glass piano inside her sister, fragile and in danger of breaking. Radek agrees that it may already be broken and says he suddenly fell in love with Elfrieda and wanted to protect her. His disclosure changes the emotional meaning of Yolandi’s Prague fantasy: the imagined shared future now seems threatened by his attachment to her sister. Yolandi suspects that Radek is lying when he denies being attracted to Elfrieda, and lets the fantasy go, noting that Prague had evidently not been an easy place for Franz Kafka either.