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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
After the pandemic-years 2020 and 2021, with their ever-changing rules and restrictions, the Frankfurt Chamber Opera (Kammeroper) returned to the Palmengarten and put on ten open-air performances of a staged opera in the summer of 2022. Okay, it was only a one-act opera, but they made it seem like two Read More …
To add to the excitement of an open-air performance, you never know how the weather is going to develop in this part of the world. For the summer performances of the Frankfurt Chamber Opera (Kammeroper), the bandstand of the Palmengarten is used as the stage, and it has a roof 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 in German and English 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 Read More …