North Czech Philharmonic Teplice

Spa towns kept orchestras to entertain their visitors, and Teplice's outlived the fashion that created it: the North Czech Philharmonic traces its line to 1838, which makes it one of the oldest orchestras in the Czech lands. The town has a Beethoven connection to match — he took the waters here, and it was in Teplice in 1812 that he and Goethe met — and the orchestra has made that inheritance its own through an annual Beethoven festival. Its season is played in Teplice with regular appearances in Prague, and the central German and Czech repertoire remains its ground.