The Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper) is one of the world’s busiest opera houses, with 350 performances per year. When I was there, in the last week of October 2016, they put on five performances of three different operas. I went to all three of these. There were two evenings Read More …
The Volksoper (meaning “People’s Opera”) in Vienna puts on about three hundred performances per year — nearly every evening from September through June — of operas, operettas, musicals and ballets. Like the Komische Oper in Berlin and the Gärtnerplatz opera house in Munich, the Volksoper has a policy of performing most their Read More …
This historic theater got its name from the fact that it was built on the bank of a small river called the Wien — a river that has since been banished underground. For many years the Theater an der Wien presented a mixed bag of operas, operettas, musicals and spoken Read More …
During his ten years in Vienna, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived at a number of different addresses. His apartment at Domgasse 5 is said to be “the largest, most elegant and expensive apartment ever occupied by Mozart and the only one that is still intact today.” He lived here Read More …
This “House of Music” (Haus der Musik) in Vienna describes itself as “an interactive sound museum which provides a new approach to music on a playful as well as scientific level.” It was opened in the year 2000 in a building that was once the palace of Archduke Charles (1771–1847), Read More …
The Musikverein (Music Society) maintains this ornate historic concert hall in the center of Vienna. The one concert I attended here was many years ago, so I have no photos of the inside, but you can easily see what it looks like by watching (for example) the annual televised New Read More …
All you loyal readers of my Kaiserslautern post might recall that one of the operas I saw there was Jonny spielt auf by Ernst Krenek (1900-1991). This was the opera that sparked a remarkably sudden shift in the tastes of German-language opera-goers in 1927, away from the lavish Neo-Romantic extravaganzas of Read More …
The MuseumsQuartier Wien claims to be “one of the largest art and culture complexes in the world.” It opened in 2001 in a group of 18th and 19th century buildings that once served as the Imperial Stables. (Imagine these monumental buildings and courtyards full of horses — hundreds of horses.) Read More …
All you loyal readers of my Liège posts might recall that for over eight centuries, from 980–1795, “a large swath of what is now Belgium was ruled from Liège by a succession of Prince-Bishops, who as the name implies were both the secular and the religious rulers. Separation of church Read More …
The poet Georg Trakl was born in Salzburg in 1887. His birth house, at Waagplatz 1a, is now the site of the Trakl Research and Memorial Center. It can be visited on weekday afternoons at 14:00, on guided tours only. The cost as of 2020 is five Euros. The tours Read More …