After the pandemic-years 2020 and 2021, with their ever-changing rules and restrictions, the Frankfurt Chamber Opera (Kammeroper) returned to the Palmengarten and put on ten open-air performances of a staged opera in the summer of 2022. Okay, it was only a one-act opera, but they made it seem like two Read More …
To add to the excitement of an open-air performance, you never know how the weather is going to develop in this part of the world. For the summer performances of the Frankfurt Chamber Opera (Kammeroper), the bandstand of the Palmengarten is used as the stage, and it has a roof Read More …
The big open-air opera production at the St Gallen Festival in 2022 was supposed to have been Orleanskaja dewa (The Maid of Orleans) by the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893). But then, (as the general director of the St Gallen Theater explained it in the German opera magazine Das Read More …
In the summers from 1961 to 1966, and again every summer since 1994, the steps leading up to St. Mary’s Cathedral in Erfurt have been the venue for open-air theater, music and opera performances at the DomStufen Festspiele, the Cathedral Steps Festival. This is a festival I have never attended, 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 …
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 …
Jeunesses Musicales presented the opera La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) in an open-air production in the courtyard of Weikersheim Palace on nine evenings in July 2005. These biennial opera productions, in the odd-numbered years, are almost always chosen from the world’s twenty or so most popular operas. La Traviata Read More …
The stage set for Act 1 of Puccini’s La Bohème in the courtyard of Weikersheim Palace was dominated by a book with the German title Engel laufen nackt (Angels run naked). This, we learned, was the quite successful first novel by a young author named Rodolfo Martinelli, who in this Read More …
At first glance, the Konstabler Wache in downtown Frankfurt might seem like an unpromising venue for an open-air opera performance. This is one of the least distinguished public squares in Europe, if not the world, and is bounded on one side by a busy street with bus, tram and automobile 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 …