Some time ago, on a whim, I typed “7 rue des Rosiers Paris” into Google Maps, just to see the building where I lived for two months in 1962 and for a month and a half in 1966. I was surprised to find a listing at this address for “Flora Read More …
Admission to the German Pharmacy Museum is included in the ticket for Heidelberg Castle. The museum is located in one of the castle buildings called the Ottheinrichbau, which is mainly a ruin but still has enough usable rooms to house a museum. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the Ottheinrichbau was named Read More …
The S-Printing Horse is said to be the largest horse sculpture in the world. It seems to have left two footprints or rather hoofprints in the pavement in front of the Print Media Academy, so when you come out of the central train station in Heidelberg you could cross the Read More …
The most colorful building in the center of Magdeburg is the Grüne Zitadelle or Green Citadel, which is the last building to have been designed by the Austrian artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000). Construction was delayed for several years because of financial problems and also because of protests by Read More …
The Austrian artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928-2000) was well known for his colorful, whimsical buildings with rounded edges and slanting towers, garishly decorated with thousands of small tiles. His buildings were never very practical, because he didn’t want to “enslave” people by locking them up in boxes with straight Read More …
On this house by the Quellenpark (Spring Park) in Bad Soden there are two different plaques, both with the momentous information that the opera composer Richard Wagner slept here on the night of August 12-13, 1860, which was his “first night on German soil” after “eleven years of exile from Read More …
This town — now an affluent suburb of Frankfurt — was only called Soden until 1922, when it finally got state permission to use the highly coveted word Bad in its name. The German word Bad means bath, so the towns that start with Bad are all spas. They all Read More …
After the pandemic-years 2020 and 2021, with their ever-changing rules and restrictions, the Frankfurt Chamber Opera (Kammeroper) returned to the Palmengarten and put on ten open-air performances of a staged opera in the summer of 2022. Okay, it was only a one-act opera, but they made it seem like two Read More …
To add to the excitement of an open-air performance, you never know how the weather is going to develop in this part of the world. For the summer performances of the Frankfurt Chamber Opera (Kammeroper), the bandstand of the Palmengarten is used as the stage, and it has a roof Read More …
The big open-air opera production at the St Gallen Festival in 2022 was supposed to have been Orleanskaja dewa (The Maid of Orleans) by the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893). But then, (as the general director of the St Gallen Theater explained it in the German opera magazine Das Read More …