Featured posts of the week or month (or quarter)
(depending on how often I get around to changing them)
Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier
Since the name of this theater means ‘Theatre of the Old Pigeon-House’, I used to think the theater building was just that, an old pigeon-house (dovecote) that somebody decided to re-purpose after a sharp decline in the demand for pigeon meat. Considering the size of the theatre, I thought it Read More ...
Verdi and Monteverdi
Despite the similarity of their names (Verdi means greens and Monteverdi means green mountain), the opera composers Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) and Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) were not related to each other. Since Monteverdi was born 256 years earlier, he could have been Verdi’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, but he wasn’t. Geographically, however, they were Read More ...
Thanks Willy!
It used to be that when you come out of the central railroad station in Erfurt, the first thing you saw just across the square was an abandoned hotel called the Erfurter Hof. Just another empty building, except that in one window there was a large black and white photo Read More ...
Swimmers in the Aare
While I was riding my bicycle along the banks of the Aare River in Bern, I noticed that there were small groups, then large groups, then dozens of people in swimming suits, most of them barefoot, walking long distances up the bank of the river. Then I noticed that there Read More ...
Tower of 300 Meters
In my old Guide de Paris, published by A. Taride around what we quaintly used to call ‘the turn of the century’ (meaning around 1900), the Eiffel Tower is not listed under E for Eiffel but under T for Tour, the French word for tower. In the first line of Read More ...
Julius Caesar in Besançon
The fortifications in this model were designed by Vauban in the seventeenth century, but the topography was the same when Julius Caesar came through with his army in the year 58 BC. His description of Besançon (then known as Vesontio) is in Book 1 (Chapter 38) of his Commentarii de Read More ...
Main Valley Tour: Miltenberg to Aschaffenburg
All you loyal readers of my post on Mozart’s Così fan tutte in Freiberg might recall that in Germany there are “numerous place names ending in -berg (= mountain or hill) or -burg (= castle),” and for us poor foreigners it can sometimes be tricky to remember which is which. As I pointed out in Read More ...
Quartering of soldiers in Tân Ba 1964
A day or two after my arrival, Major Giam informed us (through me as his interpreter) that he wanted us to move into a different house. It was located at the highest point in the village, just slightly higher than the rest, but one of the basics of military tactics Read More ...
Since when is Frankfurt in Bavaria?
In the database of the now-defunct website VirtualTourist (VT) there were four places in Germany called Frankfurt. One was a large city in Land Hessen called Frankfurt am Main, which is best known for its huge, noisy airport. Frankfurt am Main is where I live and is also the home Read More ...
Frankfurt’s fabulous opera company
My absolutely favorite place in Frankfurt am Main is the opera house. No, I don’t mean the Old Opera House. I mean the real opera house on Willy-Brandt-Platz, where they put on real operas several times a week. Like most opera houses, the Frankfurt Opera has no particular dress code. Read More ...
Opern-Gespräche
Mehr als zwei Jahrzehnte lang, von Oktober 1999 bis März 2020, habe ich einen Kurs namens Opern-Gespräche an der Volkshochschule Frankfurt geleitet. In diesem Kurs haben wir — nicht nur ich! — uns mit fachkundigen Gästen aus dem Opernbetrieb über das reichhaltige Frankfurter Operngeschehen unterhalten. Die Diskussionen waren fast immer Read More ...
Conversation and more
The photos in this post are by a professional photographer, Rolf Oeser, who happens to be a long-time participant in one of my English courses at the Frankfurt Adult Education Center (VHS). Rolf’s photos appear nearly every day in the Frankfurter Rundschau, one of the city’s three daily newspapers. He Read More ...