Here’s a countdown of my ten most-often-viewed blog posts in the year 2021, as tabulated by WordPress and delivered to me through the Jetpack plugin by Automattic Inc. (Five of these posts were also on my top ten list for 2020.) # 10 — Picnic by the Eiffel Tower. In September Read More …
My absolutely favorite place in Frankfurt am Main is the opera house. No, I don’t mean the Old Opera House. I mean the real opera house on Willy-Brandt-Platz, where they put on real operas several times a week. Like most opera houses, the Frankfurt Opera has no particular dress code. Read More …
For over two decades, I taught opera appreciation courses at the Volkshochschule Frankfurt (VHS), the city’s adult education center. I started the German-language Opern-Gespräche in 1999, and added the English-language Frankfurt OperaTalk in 2002. Both these courses were still going strong in March 2020, when they were abruptly ended by Read More …
Mehr als zwei Jahrzehnte lang, von Oktober 1999 bis März 2020, habe ich einen Kurs namens Opern-Gespräche an der Volkshochschule Frankfurt geleitet. In diesem Kurs haben wir — nicht nur ich! — uns mit fachkundigen Gästen aus dem Opernbetrieb über das reichhaltige Frankfurter Operngeschehen unterhalten. Die Diskussionen waren fast immer Read More …
The photos in this post are by a professional photographer, Rolf Oeser, who happens to be a long-time participant in one of my English courses at the Frankfurt Adult Education Center (VHS). Rolf’s photos appear nearly every day in the Frankfurter Rundschau, one of the city’s three daily newspapers. He Read More …
When I first moved to Frankfurt in 1970 we lived in a fourth-floor apartment not far from the city center. From our bathroom window we could see the ruins of the old opera house (Alte Oper) with trees growing out of the upper floors. The trees were quite tall by Read More …
This barn-like structure in the Frankfurt district of Bockenheim, near the old university campus, served for many decades as a depot for streetcars. I can remember when the whole place was full of tracks, and they drove the streetcars in at night when they weren’t being used. Now the tracks Read More …
If the legendary ancient Greek singer Orpheus were alive today he would be an opera singer, right? Well, not exactly. He would sing like an opera singer, but he would look, dress and act like a rock star, and his beautiful bride Eurydice would be a spaced-out groupie. At least Read More …
Have you ever been in this situation? You’re traveling with a dozen or so nice people from several different countries, and you’re all very excited about the next leg of your journey. Everybody gets packed up, and they keep talking about departing (also various ones fall in love with each Read More …
My office in 2001 was on the fifth floor of a six-story building in the unfashionable Gallus quarter of Frankfurt. At around three in the afternoon (German time) on a Tuesday my colleague from the next office came in and told me she had just received a strange phone call Read More …