The Opernhaus (Opera House) in Wuppertal is on the left bank of the Wupper River in Barmen, a former industrial city which is now a district of the city of Wuppertal. Like many other German opera houses, this one was built in the first decade of the 20th century. It Read More …
In June 2010 in the Zürich opera house I had a super box seat with some lovely people for a performance of the opera Der ferne Klang (The distant sound) by Franz Schreker (1878-1934). This is Schreker’s second opera. It had its world premiere in Frankfurt in 1912, but had Read More …
Altenburg is a city in the eastern part of Germany which has lost 41 % of its population since 1981. At that time it had 55,827 inhabitants, but by 2015, when the city council voted to disband its statistics department to save money, the population was down to 32,910. Most Read More …
While Salzburg is full of impressive and significant places to visit, like the fortress, the cathedral quarter, the festival halls and the two Mozart houses, I must admit that my favorite place in this town is the Landestheater (State Theatre), an outwardly inconspicuous building on Makartplatz that you might not Read More …
The opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) happened to be playing on a very grey, rainy and unseasonably cold weekend in May 2007 in the dead-looking city of Hagen, at the edge of Germany’s Ruhr District.
I must admit that I would never have read the novel Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) if it hadn’t later been made into a major opera, Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) by the German composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957). After seeing Korngold’s opera seven or eight times in Altenburg, Hagen Read More …