On a clear summer evening you could do worse than to join the many Parisians and visitors for a stroll along the banks of the Seine at sunset. I took this first photo in 2007 from the bridge called Pont de la Tournelle, looking towards Notre-Dame Cathedral. By coincidence this Read More …
Better bike lanes, fewer bookshops — the recent changes at Place Saint-Michel are a mixed bag. The bicycle lanes at Place Saint-Michel are now wider and better protected than I remember them from before the pandemic. This is typical of the improvements that have been made to the bicycle infrastructure Read More …
The opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) was 29 years younger than Händel and 42 years older than Mozart — although Mozart narrowed the age gap somewhat by starting to compose operas at age 11. Gluck tried out many different styles during his forty-year composing career, but today he is best Read More …
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 …
Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) was one of the world’s first opera composers. He wrote at least eighteen operas, but most of them have been lost. His earliest surviving opera, L’Orfeo (Orpheus), was first performed in 1607 in Mantua, Italy, at the court of Duke Vincenzo I. Monteverdi was forty years old Read More …
Here’s a countdown of my ten most-often-viewed blog posts in the year 2022, with links. (Five of these were also on my top-ten list for 2021.) # 10 — Jacques Brel’s Marieke in Brugge/Bruges. It took me a long time to realize why the gorgeous young ladies in French love Read More …
In September 2022, I logged into my Vélib’ account with the intention of buying my usual 7-day pass, only to discover that the 7-day pass had been replaced by a 3-day pass for the same price, € 15 at that time, now € 20. The elimination of the 7-day pass had apparently Read More …
From the Arch of Triumph in Paris there are twelve major avenues that radiate out in twelve directions. The best-known of these twelve avenues is the Champs-Élysées, which still had a disgusting ten lanes of cars when I took these photos in 2012. Now it is down to eight, as Read More …
Wagner’s operas are an acquired taste, and it took me about a decade to acquire. Not only was Wagner one of the two most influential opera composers of the nineteenth century, he was also a huge influence on Hitler and the rise of the Nazi party in the twentieth. The Read More …
Paris, like most cities, had a large assortment of internet cafés for about ten to fifteen years, around the turn of the millennium. The newspaper Le Monde, in an article published in 2015, spoke of “the golden age of the cybercafés” as lasting from 1995 to 2005. Since then, “customers Read More …