The composer Richard Wagner lived in Zürich, Switzerland, from 1849 to 1858. This was not exactly voluntary, since he was facing prosecution in Germany for his part in trying to organize the short-lived revolution of 1848. But when he and his wife got to Zürich, they were taken in and Read More …
What do the German cities of Kassel and Leipzig have in common? In the early 1950s, both cities held architectural competitions to see who could design the best new modern opera house. Both of these competitions were won by architect Hans Scharoun (1893-1972) — but neither of his proposed buildings Read More …
Erfurt’s original opera house, now the Alte Oper or Old Opera, was first built in the nineteenth century. It survived the Second World War intact and was used as an opera venue more or less continuously until 1997, when it was condemned as a fire hazard. Actually, they went on 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 …
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 …
Bad Orb is a cute little town in the Spessart hills in the German state of Hessen, about 60 km east of Frankfurt. Since it only had 10,172 inhabitants at last count (end of 2019), you will not be shocked to learn that there is no opera house in Bad Read More …
The Vienna State Opera (Wiener Staatsoper) is one of the world’s busiest opera houses, with 350 performances per year. When I was there, in the last week of October 2016, they put on five performances of three different operas. I went to all three of these. There were two evenings Read More …
The Volksoper (meaning “People’s Opera”) in Vienna puts on about three hundred performances per year — nearly every evening from September through June — of operas, operettas, musicals and ballets. Like the Komische Oper in Berlin and the Gärtnerplatz opera house in Munich, the Volksoper has a policy of performing most their 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 …
All you loyal readers of my Kaiserslautern post might recall that one of the operas I saw there was Jonny spielt auf by Ernst Krenek (1900-1991). This was the opera that sparked a remarkably sudden shift in the tastes of German-language opera-goers in 1927, away from the lavish Neo-Romantic extravaganzas of Read More …