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 …
This historic theater got its name from the fact that it was built on the bank of a small river called the Wien — a river that has since been banished underground. For many years the Theater an der Wien presented a mixed bag of operas, operettas, musicals and spoken Read More …
We 21st century folks are so accustomed to doing everything electronically that we tend to forget about (or not even know about) the amazing mechanical devices our grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents used to use. From music boxes to player pianos, musical clocks to orchestrions, barrel organs to self-playing violins, Read More …
The composer Jacques Offenbach was born in 1819, so 2019 was his bicentenary. This cartoon by the front entrance of the Lausanne opera house shows him saying “200 years, already…?” and thinking “At the Opera of Lausanne.” For the bicentenary, the Lausanne Opera presented two of Offenbach’s operas, Tales of Read More …
The Théâtre du Gymnase Marie Bell is one of the many theaters on the grands boulevards in Paris — and no doubt one of the oldest, having been built in the early 19th century and inaugurated in 1820. From the outside it doesn’t show its age, particularly, but inside it Read More …
Here at Schillerplatz 26 in Bamberg is where the author, composer and painter E.T.A. Hoffmann lived from 1808 until 1813, just across from the theater which now bears his name. His position as music director of the theater didn’t last very long, so he soon had to make his living Read More …
In Paris back in 2011 I saw an insightful theatrical revue about the Second Empire, the eighteen-year period from 1852 to 1870 when Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte ruled France as Emperor Napoléon III. The musical spectacle “Hugoffenbach” combined texts by Victor Hugo (1802-1885), expressing his outrage at Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s seizure of power, Read More …
My first visit to Rostock was just five days after the opening of the Berlin Wall, as I have described in my post Rostock 1989. My second visit was a very brief business trip in 1998. My third visit was in January 2009. This was also a business trip, but Read More …
The composer Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) is best known today for his one serious opera, Tales of Hoffmann, which he composed shortly before his death, based on the life and writings of the German author and composer E.T.A. Hoffmann. But actually Tales of Hoffmann was only one of 102 works for Read More …
Several years ago I wrote that Paris had five opera houses, one of which was the Théâtre du Châtelet. Since then, however, the Châtelet has become more and more specialized in presenting operettas and musicals, so I wouldn’t really call it an opera house any more. It is now subtitled Read More …