In January 2023, the Frankfurt Opera mounted a new production of Orlando (HWV 31) by Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759). Orlando is one of three Händel operas based on episodes from Ludovico Ariosto’s verse epic Orlando furioso, the other two being Ariodante and Alcina. Ariosto’s long poem was first published in Read More …
Here the soloists, chorus members and conductor at the Frankfurt Opera are taking their bows at the end of a staged performance of Hercules, by Georg Friedrich Händel, in 2023. (That’s a statue of Hercules in the background.) In the HWV-catalogue of Händel’s works (HWV = Händel-Werke-Verzeichnis in German), Hercules has the number HWV Read More …
These people are waiting to enter the St. Marien-Kirche (Saint Mary’s Church) in Göttingen, Germany, to attend a choral concert by the Athens Chamber Choir. The orange truck on the right is a sound truck from the North German Radio (NDR), a public radio station that recorded the concert for Read More …
Semele by Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759) was the featured Festival Opera, fully staged, at the Göttingen International Händel Festival in 2023 — even though by the composer’s definition it was not an opera at all, but rather just a “Story” told “after the Manner of an Oratorio.” The text of Read More …
In the late 1920s, the cities of Frankfurt and Paris both hired prominent architects and engineers to build innovative railway freight stations. Both these stations remained in use for over seven decades for unloading and sorting merchandise that had been brought in by rail. Both stations were later designated as Read More …
During the Second World War, the Nazis mis-used the excellent railway infrastructure at the Frankfurt wholesale produce market for the deportation of Jews from Frankfurt and vicinity to the extermination camps in eastern Europe. There is now a memorial to the murdered Jews at the eastern edge of the European Read More …
Salome, by Richard Strauss, is a difficult opera to cast. The singer of the title role has to be a dramatic soprano with a huge voice that will carry over a full-power 110-piece orchestra, which usually means a Brunnhilde-type in her fifties. On the other hand, the character of Salome Read More …
Salome was the daughter of Herodias and the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea. Her story is told in the Bible (Mark 6:21-28): And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Read More …
It’s a nice coincidence that Saverio Mercadante’s name ends in -dante, because it was the poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) who saved Mercadante’s opera heroine Francesca da Rimini from being totally forgotten. As the dramaturge Mareike Wink writes in the Frankfurt program booklet to Mercadante’s opera, “if Dante hadn’t immortalized her Read More …
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 …