Standing room at the Opéra Bastille

In September 2011 I paid all of five Euros and got the next-to-last standing room ticket for the premiere of the opera Salomé by Richard Strauss (1864-1949). This was the Read More …

Krenek at Neue Oper Wien

All you loyal readers of my Kaiserslautern post might recall that one of the operas I saw there was Jonny spielt auf by Ernst Krenek (1900-1991). This was the opera that Read More …

Molière at the Théâtre des Célestins

When I saw the beautiful old Théâtre des Célestins in Lyon from the year 1881 I knew I had to go and see something there, no matter what they were Read More …

Mozart in the Madeleine

When he died in December 1791 at age 35, the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was still working on his last composition, his Requiem Mass in D Minor (K. 626). The Read More …

Operas and cycling in . . . Gelsenkirchen?

In 1958 the Austrian singer-songwriter Georg Kreisler (1922-2011), author of Lola Blau and the hilarious Opera Boogie, made a lot of enemies in this part of Germany with his song Read More …

Public transport in Lyon

On the evening of January 29, 1956, the last tram (aka streetcar) made its last run on the last line of Lyon’s urban tramway system. That was the old line Read More …

Cycling in Lyon

Lyon has an excellent bicycle sharing system called Vélo’v, which is a combination of the French word Vélo, meaning bicycle, and the English word Love. Vélo’v was not the first Read More …

Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon

The Museum of Fine Arts (Musée des Beaux Arts) in Lyon is located in a former Benedictine abbey dating from the 17th century. In the center there is a pleasant Read More …

Villa Lumière in Lyon

Auguste Lumière (1862-1954) and his brother Louis Lumière (1864-1948) became very wealthy in their early twenties thanks to their invention of a machine that could mass-produce photographic gelatin dry-plates. Their Read More …

New places in Vietnam, 1995

In the summer of 1995 my older son Nick and I went to Vietnam to see some of the places where I had been stationed as an American soldier thirty Read More …

About me

Hello, my name’s Don. I’m an American living in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where I teach, ride a bicycle and go to the opera. I became an opera fan at Read More ...

Frankfurt OperaTalk

If you speak English, live in or near Frankfurt and are interested in opera, be sure to sign up for Germany’s only English-language opera appreciation course, Frankfurt OperaTalk, at the Read More ...

Opern-Gespräche

Seit 1999 leite ich einen Kurs namens „Opern-Gespräche“ an der Volkshochschule Frankfurt. In diesem Kurs reden wir (nicht nur ich!) mit fachkundigen Gästen aus dem Opernbetrieb über das reichhaltige Frankfurter Read More ...

Operas and cycling and whatnot

Get on your bike … and ride to the opera house.