The Bad Hersfeld Festival is held in the Stiftsruine (abbey ruins), the remains of a large church that was originally built between 831 and 850. This church was part of a Catholic monastery for the first several centuries of its existence, but on May 1, 1521, Martin Luther came to Read More …
This historic theater, the Athénée Théâtre Louis-Jouvet, was built in the 1890s and has been a subsidized public theater since 1982. It has a small orchestra pit for musical productions, and is also used for spoken drama and concerts. La Carmencita, which I saw there in 2006, is an adapted Read More …
Whatever else you might have heard about Toulon, you should be aware that it has a gorgeous nineteenth century opera house — one of the largest opera houses in France outside of Paris. The Toulon Opera aka Théâtre Municipal was inaugurated in 1862. A few years ago it was beautifully Read More …
The sun never shines on the façade of the Municipal Opera House in Marseille because the building faces north (or more precisely north-northwest). So whatever time of day you take a picture, it will always be in the shade. This was not seen as a problem in 1786, when the Read More …
Like many of the other opera houses in Germany, the Coburg State Theater was originally founded as a court theater. Coburg in earlier times was the Residence of the Dukes of Sachsen-Coburg, a princely family that was famous in the nineteenth century particularly because one of its members, Prince Leopold, became Read More …
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 …
On my visit to Verona in August 2006 I saw three open-air opera performances in the Arena: Verdi’s Aida, Bizet’s Carmen and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. What they had in common was that all three productions were by the same stage director, Franco Zeffirelli (1923-2019), who also designed the stage sets Read More …
This “Liberty Square” in Toulon is a good place to ruminate on the ambiguities of the concept of Liberté, especially since Toulon in former times was best known not as a place of liberty but as the site of a brutal prison colony, the Bagne. The second act of Bizet’s Read More …