DRESDEN, Germany -- Just back from a whirlwind one-day visit to Prague, about a two-hour train ride from Dresden. The railroad tracks follow the Elbe and Vltava (or Moldau) rivers most of the way, passing through bucolic countryside. You can see how the 19th century romantic German and Czech composers got their inspiration from this landscape.

Our Music Critics Association of North America gathering in Dresden wound up Wednesday night with a final performance, followed by another late-night dinner at an outdoor restaurant on the plaza around the Frauenkirche. I then stayed on an extra day to go and walk the cobblestone streets of Prague, an amazing, otherworldly (and very touristy) place. I plan to write a travel piece for the St. Petersburg Times that will include some of what I did, but until then I simply must mention an extraordinary contemporary art museum I came across, the Museum Kampa, a Cubist fantasy structure on an island in the Vltava River. I dropped in to see a Max Beckmann exhibit and ended up spending most of the afternoon there.

Visual arts took up a good part of my time away from concert venues in Dresden, which has about a dozen major museums. The showcase is a baroque palace called the Zwinger, which was built by Augustus the Strong (1670-1733), the elector of Saxony and arts patron who laid the groundwork for the city as a cultural center. Augustus was a collector of many things -- including mistresses, with whom he had countless illegitimate children -- but his greatest collection was of porcelain art objects from China, Japan and Germany (the famous Meissen porcelain, still manufactured in a town outside Dresden). His vast porcelain collection now has a museum all to itself at the Zwinger, and it is astonishing.

Augustus was linked to the final performance we attended, a concert version of Teofane, an early 18th century opera by the Venetian composer Antonio Lotti. (New Yorker music critic Alex Ross writes about the genre -- though not Lotti -- in his latest piece for the magazine.) The connection was that Teofane was performed in Dresden during the rule of Augustus, so he may well have seen it.

I expect he had an easier time following Lotti's opera than I did. The cast of seven, with the excellent Dresdner Kapellsolisten, a small orchestra conducted by Helmut Branny, sang in Italian, while all the audience had to follow along with was the German libretto. And to make matters more confusing, the work had undergone cuts (not indicated in the libretto) and still ran three hours.

Even with not understanding the story, which seemed pretty slight anyway, I enjoyed several singers, especially soprano Tamara Gura as Gismonda, a character part with a big virtuosic aria in the third act, and soprano Jutta Bohnert in the title role. I actually got quite a lot out of Teofane, because I don't have much chance to experience this kind of opera. The companies I cover rarely stray from the standard repertory. The last early opera I reviewed was a production by Florida Grand Opera some years ago of Mozart's youthful effort La Finta Giardiniera, composed about 60 years after Lotti's. It was interesting to compare the similarities in tone and structure between the two. Now if I could only figure out what was going on.

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