Two crumbling landmarks on a hill
Up on a hill at the south end of Liège, Belgium, there is a church called Sacré Coeur (Sacred Heart) and a tower called the Inter-Allied Monument. These can be Read More …
Category: Belgium
Guillemins Railway Station
A good way to start a conversation in Liège, Belgium, is to ask people what they think of the new Guillemins Railway Station. The answers I got typically started: “Well, Read More …
Musical Instrument Museum in Brussels
This Art Nouveau building from the year 1899 was originally built for the “Old England” department store. After the store moved out some seventy years later, the building stood empty Read More …
BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels
The word “BOZAR” is a rough phonetic spelling of the French term Beaux-Arts, meaning Fine Arts. From the outside, the building looks rather similar to the nearby Central Railway Station, Read More …
Massenet’s Werther in Brussels
In Brussels I saw the same opera two nights in a row in two different versions. The first night the title role was sung by a baritone, Ludovic Tézier, and Read More …
Jacques Brel’s Marieke in Brugge/Bruges
In the song by Jacques Brel, Marieke was twenty years old when he loved her so much (and so long ago) between the towers of Brugge/Bruges and Gent/Gand in the Read More …
Grétry Museum in Liège
The composer André-Modeste Grétry (1741-1813) was born in Liège, and his birth house has been turned into a small museum. Grétry was extremely popular during his lifetime. He composed about Read More …
Salomé in the opera tent
The Théâtre Royal de Liège, home of the Royal Opera of the Wallonia, was closed for several years to be reconstructed and enlarged. When I was there in 2011, I Read More …
In the footsteps (or wagon ruts) of Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo’s first visit to Liège was in 1840, when he was thirty-eight years old. He was travelling by stagecoach, known in French as a diligence, and was on his Read More …
The Dead City
I must admit that I would never have read the novel Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) if it hadn’t later been made into a major opera, Die tote Stadt (The Read More …