Weikersheim is a pleasant country town (population 7,333) in the Tauber Valley, 63 kilometers upstream from Wertheim and 37 kilometers downstream from Rothenburg ob der Tauber. The surprising thing about Weikersheim is that it has a Renaissance palace (Schloss Weikersheim) with a sizable formal garden modeled after the one in Read More …
Jeunesses Musicales presented the opera La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) in an open-air production in the courtyard of Weikersheim Palace on nine evenings in July 2005. These biennial opera productions, in the odd-numbered years, are almost always chosen from the world’s twenty or so most popular operas. La Traviata Read More …
In 2009 in the courtyard of Weikersheim Palace I saw three performances, with somewhat different casts, of the German opera The Merry Wives of Windsor by Otto Nicolai (1810-1849), based on Shakespeare’s play of the same name. This is a light opera which used to be extremely popular in Germany Read More …
The stage set for Act 1 of Puccini’s La Bohème in the courtyard of Weikersheim Palace was dominated by a book with the German title Engel laufen nackt (Angels run naked). This, we learned, was the quite successful first novel by a young author named Rodolfo Martinelli, who in this Read More …
Before the opera or during the intermission you can get a glass of champagne or Sekt here and go for a stroll in the garden. This is a formal baroque garden, modeled after the one in Versailles, including an “Orangerie” at the far end. There are over fifty statues of Read More …
Weikersheim Palace was originally just a routine medieval castle with a moat around it until the 16th century, when Count Wolfgang II of the House of Hohenlohe developed it into an imposing residence for himself and his family. The palace is on the Market Square and is the only large Read More …
The stone building with the pointy roof on the central Market Square (Marktplatz) in Weikersheim is the Tauberländer Dorfmuseum, which is devoted to showing furnishings, equipment and tools that were used by rural people in this area in pre-industrial times. The museum is open on Saturday, Sunday and holiday afternoons Read More …
The Weikersheim Planetary Trail begins on the Tauber Valley Cycling Route at the northern edge of the city of Weikersheim. A yellow sphere, about one and a half meters in diameter, represents the sun at a scale of 1:1,000,000,000. From there you start walking or cycling slightly uphill towards the Read More …
Every summer since 2008, the city of Weikersheim has hosted an outdoor sculpture exhibition of works by a prominent contemporary sculptor. When I was in Weikersheim in the summer of 2009 they had an outdoor exhibition of eighteen works by the German sculptor Guido Messer (born 1941 in Buenos Aires), Read More …
The Tauber Valley is served by a single-track non-electrified railway line. Aside from local trains there are Regional Express trains from Aschaffenburg several times a day, and also a few from Würzburg. The end of the line for passenger trains is Crailsheim, 50 kilometers further south, where there are connections Read More …