A characteristic feature of Augsburg is the existence of two churches side by side with the same name, a fancy white one for the Catholics and a more austere yellow-brown one for the Protestants. In another part of town there are also two St. Ulrich’s churches, in the same colors. Read More …
It only rained once during the ten days I was in Paris in June 2006, and that was — you guessed it — ten minutes before show time at an open-air opera performance in the Senate Gardens, which are in the Luxembourg Gardens right behind Luxembourg Palace. A nice announcer Read More …
There are several hundred lively small theaters scattered around Paris and vicinity. Some of them disappear after a few years, but this one in the Marais district has been going strong since 1980, presenting “the great authors and their great works, classical or contemporary.” The play I saw here was Read More …
Augsburg was the birthplace of Leopold Mozart (1719-1787). He was a composer and musician in his own right, and also the author of what was then a standard textbook on learning to play the violin. But of course he is most famous as the father, teacher, manager and slave-driver of Read More …
This theater is not on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, as I used to think, but is several blocks from there on Avenue Montaigne near the Place de l’Alma on the right bank of the Seine. This is a very wealthy district of Paris, in fact for apartment buyers Avenue Montaigne Read More …
This is the house where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in 1756. He lived here for the first seventeen years of his life — when he wasn’t off traveling with his father and sister, which was most of the time. In 2006, just in time for Mozart’s 250th birthday, a Read More …
Here’s my list of the operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), including a few that were never completed or are sometimes listed as something else. As on my Verdi list, I have listed the opera titles in different colors: Red means I have seen the opera at least once in Read More …
For nearly two centuries Salzburg’s big tourist draw was Mozart. The great eighteenth century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756 and lived here — when he wasn’t travelling around Europe performing as a child prodigy — until he was literally kicked out (“with a kick in Read More …
The Salzburg Festival is one of the world’s largest and most intensive summer music and drama festivals, with more than two hundred performances packed into six weeks in July and August each summer. I have never attended any of these performances, both because they are beyond my price range and Read More …
The Festungsbahn going up to the fortress overlooking Salzburg is Austria’s oldest funicular railway that is still in operation. It was built in 1892, and now takes people up from the city to the fortress in just 54 seconds. The lower station, on the Festungsgasse, is where you can buy tickets, Read More …