The Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper) is one of the world’s busiest opera houses, with 350 performances per year. When I was there, in the last week of October 2016, they put on five performances of three different operas. I went to all three of these. There were two evenings Read More …
This barn-like structure in the Frankfurt district of Bockenheim, near the old university campus, served for many decades as a depot for streetcars. I can remember when the whole place was full of tracks, and they drove the streetcars in at night when they weren’t being used. Now the tracks Read More …
When I think of Berlin I think of opera and construction sites — and here I was lucky enough to get both in the same photo, because they happened to be ripping up the street “Unter den Linden” right in front of the State Opera House (Staatsoper) when I was Read More …
The film museum has its own cinema, the “Black Box”, and four floors of exhibit space with displays of the history and aura of the movies. For example: “Film and Politics” is an exhibit on the third floor in between “Film and Money” and “Myths of the Present”. In the Read More …
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 Baroque composer and impresario Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759) was a big fan of special effects, so I’m sure he would have liked the blue-screen production of his opera Rinaldo at the Chemnitz opera house. Blue-screen is a technology that was widely used for film-making in the 1980s, for instance Read More …
The great baroque composer and impresario Georg Friedrich Händel was born in Halle in the year 1685. His birth house and several adjoining buildings have been nicely renovated and now form the Händel House and Music Museum of the City of Halle, along with the Center for Händel Research. In the nineteenth Read More …
The Händel House in Halle has an interesting exhibit on “Händel, composer of opera” where visitors can sit and watch Georg Friedrich Händel (as a sort of Monty-Python-style figure) come in, sit down at the cembalo and explain some of his operas. The spectators can push buttons to choose which Read More …
In May 2001 I was asked to take over a presentation in Halle at quite short notice. After agreeing to do it, I went online to see if Halle has an opera house (it does) and if they were performing anything on the one evening I was going to be Read More …
The opera Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar) by Georg Friedrich Händel takes place in Egypt in the year 48 B.C. and has to do with Caesar’s Egyptian war and his love affair with Cleopatra. As it was staged at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, however, the opera took place in the Read More …