The afternoon of 9/11
My office in 2001 was on the fifth floor of a six-story building in the unfashionable Gallus quarter of Frankfurt. At around three in the afternoon (German time) on a Tuesday my colleague from the next office came in and told me she had just received a strange phone call Read More ...
Tosca and 9/11
Tosca, by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), is an opera I have seen about a dozen times in Frankfurt, with several different casts in two different productions. The first of these was Alfred Kirchner’s production, which had its premiere on September 8, 2001. The premiere was generally well received by the public Read More ...
A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Geneva
In the summer of 1595 — or maybe it was 1596, nobody knows for sure — a young English playwright woke up from a weird and wonderful dream and started writing it all down as fast as he could, before the dream faded. In this dream the Duke of Athens, Read More ...
Butte-aux-Cailles
The Butte-aux-Cailles is a small neighborhood on a small hill (the word butte means ‘small hill’) in the 13th arrondissment of Paris, with relatively small houses and lots of friendly little pubs and restaurants full of arty-looking people. The word caille means ‘quail’ in French, but that’s not where the Read More ...
Felix Nussbaum House
The painter Felix Nussbaum was born in Osnabrück in 1904. He was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1944. More than 160 of Nussbaum’s paintings are now on display at the Felix Nussbaum House in Osnabrück, including his most famous one, his “Self-portrait with a Jewish pass”, which he Read More ...
The Cao Dai Eye in Tân Ba
In the center of the living room, where the television would be in an American home, the old man had a shrine with a picture of a big eye in the center. This reminded me vaguely of the CBS television eye, but actually it was a depiction of the “One Read More ...
Home of Stradivari, Monteverdi, Ponchielli
Except for people like me, who immediately think of Monteverdi, the Italian town of Cremona is best known for its long tradition as a violin-making town. It was the home of Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737), maker of the famous Stradivarius violins. His statue appropriately shows him passing on his violin-making knowledge Read More ...
The cephalophore
While reading up on the French city of Saint-Denis I discovered that there is a special word for a saint who is beheaded but then picks up his or her head and walks away with it. The word is cephalophore, from two Greek words meaning “head-carrier”. The world’s first — Read More ...
Over the Wupper
In German there is an expression ‘über die Wupper gehen’ (= ‘to go over the Wupper’), meaning to die, like going over the Jordan or the Styx in other cultures and epochs. No one knows for sure why the Wupper was chosen for this expression, rather than some better-known German Read More ...
Frankfurt OperaTalk
For over two decades, I taught opera appreciation courses at the Volkshochschule Frankfurt (VHS), the city’s adult education center. I started the German-language Opern-Gespräche in 1999, and added the English-language Frankfurt OperaTalk in 2002. Both these courses were still going strong in March 2020, when they were abruptly ended by Read More ...
Conversation and more B2
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 ...
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 ...