In the winter of 2019/2020, I took four short city-and-opera trips (three days and two nights each time) by train from Frankfurt. This was something I used to do fairly often in December and January, because I typically had fewer teaching commitments in those months than in the months before Read More …
The opera house on Lake Zürich was designed and built in 1891 by the Vienna architects Fellner and Helmer, who were involved in building no fewer than forty-eight theaters and opera houses in cities all over Europe between 1873 and 1919, including for instance Augsburg, Gießen, Salzburg and Prague. The 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 …
In the first decade of the twentieth century numerous small and middle-sized European cities built impressive municipal theaters, and Bern was no exception. To finance this one, a group of prominent local citizens got together and formed a joint-stock company to raise money for the new theater, which they later Read More …
Up to now I have seen opera performances in four Swiss cities — Zürich, Bern, Geneva and Lausanne — but never in Basel, even though their opera company has an excellent reputation and I know several people who have sung or conducted there. I suppose the reason is that Basel Read More …
The Opéra de Lausanne is the only opera house I know of that looks more impressive from the back than from the front. The front end still looks much the same as it did when it first opened in 1871, or at least the way it looked after its art-déco 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 …
One of William Shakespeare’s biggest fans in the 19th century was the great Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), who based three of his operas on Shakespeare plays, namely Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff. The composer’s second favorite author was the 18th century German playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), whom Verdi admired not Read More …