Salle Pleyel is an Art Deco concert hall that was originally built in 1927 by the Pleyel piano company. For decades it was a leading classical music venue in Paris, even though the acoustics and appearance of the building suffered from a series of botched renovation projects over the years. Read More …
Lieutenant Nissim de Camondo (1892-1917) was a French military pilot in the First World War. He died in aerial combat in 1917 and was later buried in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. His grieving father, the banker and art collector Count Moïse de Camondo (1860-1935), determined in his will that Read More …
The Cernuschi Museum has a sub-title: “Museum of the Asian arts of Paris.” This surprised me, because I thought that was what the Guimet Museum was, but it turns out that the Guimet is a ‘national’ museum, belonging to the French state, whereas the Cernuschi belongs merely to the city Read More …
In three words I can tell you what’s wrong with the Avenue des Champs-Élysées: cars, motorcycles and trucks. This street is marketed as “the most beautiful avenue in the world”, and it really is beautiful except for the fact that there is an ugly ten-lane highway running right down the Read More …
The Place de Clichy is a square where four of the Paris arrondissements come together, the 8th, 9th, 17th and 18th. During the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st this was not so much a public square as a motorized disaster area, with more than four thousand Read More …
The Arc de Triomphe was commissioned by the Emperor Napoléon I in 1806 to celebrate the triumph of his armies over the rest of Europe in the early nineteenth century, particularly his triumph over the Russian and Austrian Empires at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805. In recent decades, however, Read More …
This theater is not on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, as I used to think, but is several blocks from there on Avenue Montaigne near the Place de l’Alma on the right bank of the Seine. This is a very wealthy district of Paris, in fact for apartment buyers Avenue Montaigne Read More …
Gaspare Spontini (1774-1851) was an Italian opera composer who spent many years in Paris and later in Berlin. His best-known opera, La Vestale, was first performed in Paris in 1807. In this opera Licinius, a victorious Roman general, returns to Rome in triumph only to discover that his fiancée, Julia, Read More …
In June 2012 I went back to the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, this time to attend a benefit concert with the Ensemble Matheus, conducted by Jean-Christophe Spinosi, featuring six prominent singers who often perform in French opera houses. The ladies in this photo are, from left Read More …
When he died in December 1791 at age 35, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was still working on his last composition, his Requiem Mass in D Minor (K. 626). The Requiem had been commissioned by a mysterious messenger with wads of money who wouldn’t say who he was working for. Read More …