Victor Hugo in Bacharach
In 1840 the great French novelist Victor Hugo, author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and later Les Misérables, spent three days in Bacharach and wrote an enthusiastic description in his book Read More ...
Love in the Forest of Fontainebleau, 1559
My favorite thing about Fontainebleau is the music it inspired at the beginning of the five-act versions of the opera Don Carlos (in French) or Don Carlo (in Italian), by Read More ...
Vauban in the Invalides
Near Napoléon’s tomb in the Dôme des Invalides, in one of the side niches, is a monument to another remarkable man, Sebastian le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), a French military Read More ...
La Nouvelle Seine
La Nouvelle Seine (The New Seine) is a theatre, café and restaurant on a ship that is anchored on the Left Bank of the Seine, just across from Notre-Dame. I Read More ...
The Netherlands’ Deep South
If you look at a map of the Netherlands, you will see that the country is shaped roughly (very roughly) like a parallelogram. But if you look at the lower Read More ...
Allegorical statues
For the large formal gardens behind his palace at Versailles, King Louis XIV commissioned dozens of white marble statues showing healthy young women with good posture, many of them dressed Read More ...
Le Paris de Mitterrand
In the spring of 2019 I was invited to a book-signing in a Paris bookshop, because I had once ordered a book online from the publishing house Editions Alexandrines, so Read More ...
Chinese New Year in Paris
In Paris as in many other places throughout the world, the Chinese celebrate their New Year for fifteen days starting with the first new moon of the calendar year. Young Read More ...
Romeo’s Juliet in Verona
Okay, so Juliet might have been a fictional character, but that didn’t stop her from having a house and a balcony. Supposedly this house really did belong to a 14th Read More ...
About me
Hello, my name’s Don. I’m an American living in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where I teach, ride a bicycle and go to the opera. I became an opera fan at Read More ...
Frankfurt OperaTalk
In March 2020, the 27th semester of Frankfurt OperaTalk was interrupted after only two meetings, when all courses were suspended in an effort to contain the coronavirus pandemic. All remaining Read More ...
Opern-Gespräche
Seit 1999 leite ich einen Kurs namens Opern-Gespräche an der Volkshochschule Frankfurt. Im März 2020 wurde das 41. Semester der Opern-Gespräche durch das Coronavirus nach nur zwei Treffen unterbrochen. Ob Read More ...