Featured posts of the week or month (or quarter)
(depending on how often I get around to changing them)
Jarville-la-Malgrange
Jarville-la-Malgrange is a suburb that borders directly on the southern edge of Nancy, in the Grand Est region of France. Like most European towns, Jarville-la-Malgrange has a monument listing the men who were senselessly massacred (this is not the way it is worded on the monument) in the two ‘World Read More ...
La Gaîté Lyrique
The French word Gaîté means cheerfulness or happiness, and this historic theatre was certainly a cheerful place in the middle-to-late 1870s, when several of Jacques Offenbach’s comical operettas were performed here. Offenbach himself was the theatre’s director and impresario for two years, but he was not so happy with the Read More ...
Demolition of the AfE-Tower
For over forty years, the 116-meter AfE-Tower stood on the Bockenheim Campus of the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University in Frankfurt. For the first three years of its existence, from 1972-1975, it was the tallest building in Frankfurt. For its last few years it was the 21st tallest, before it was finally demolished through Read More ...
Rainy-day boat trip in Strasbourg
As in Amsterdam, an interesting rainy-day activity in Strasbourg is to take a boat trip around the city. I call it a rainy-day activity because when the weather is nice you will obviously prefer to be out cycling rather than just sitting in a boat. The boats leave from the Read More ...
The Opera House in Amsterdam
In the entrance hall of the Amsterdam Opera House this statue of a violinist seems to be erupting through the floor from some forgotten world below the surface. My impression of this violinist is that he is dead (look at his hand) and that he is perhaps a Jewish violinist Read More ...
The Bridge of Aspiration
Floral Street might at first look like an ordinary London street, with older brick buildings on one side and a newer stone building on the other, until you look up and notice that two of the buildings are joined by an unusual construction that stretches across the street like a Read More ...
Händel’s Alcina in Hof, Germany
Händel’s Alcina was the first Baroque opera ever to be performed in Hof, a small out-of-the-way city in the extreme northeast corner of Bavaria. I went there in 2018 not knowing what to expect, but I was completely convinced by the brilliant production and flawless performance of this “magic opera” Read More ...
The Cao Dai Eye in Tân Ba
In the center of the living room, where the television would be in an American home, the old man had a shrine with a picture of a big eye in the center. This reminded me vaguely of the CBS television eye, but actually it was a depiction of the “One Read More ...
Julius Caesar in Besançon
The fortifications in this model were designed by Vauban in the seventeenth century, but the topography was the same when Julius Caesar came through with his army in the year 58 BC. His description of Besançon (then known as Vesontio) is in Book 1 (Chapter 38) of his Commentarii de Read More ...
Conversation and 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 ...
Frankfurt OperaTalk
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 ...
Opern-Gespräche
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 ...