The composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) was born in Dessau as the son of a Jewish Kantor. He is best known in Germany for The Three Penny Opera (1928) and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930) — both to texts by German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht Read More …
The Bauhaus (which means literally ‘building-house’) was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius (1883-1969), and brought together a number of the most outstanding contemporary architects and artists. It began in Weimar, but moved to Dessau in 1924, becoming the municipally-funded College of Design. The stated intention of the Bauhaus was Read More …
Ottone, Re di Germania (Otto, King of Germany) was Händel’s fifteenth opera, composed in 1722 and first performed on January 12, 1723 by the Royal Academy of Music at the King’s Theatre Haymarket in London. I saw it three centuries later, in March 2023, as part of the 45th International Read More …
As a former working-class city, Saarbrücken is one of the few cities in the western part of Germany that has a street named after Karl Marx (1818-1883), the founder of scientific socialism and author of Das Kapital. Marx was born in Trier, which is a hundred or so kilometers downstream Read More …
There has been some sort of castle or palace on this spot since the year 999, at least. In its current form as a palace, it was first built in the eighteenth century for the ruling Count Wilhelm Heinrich of Nassau-Saarbrücken, but has been added to since then and was 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 …
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 …