La Rotonde de la Villette was built in 1784 by the architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) for use as a toll house. Anyone entering the city had to stop here and pay a tax on any merchandise they were bringing with them. If you have ever seen the opera La Read More …
Tosca, by Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924), is an opera I have seen about a dozen times in Frankfurt, with several different casts in two different productions. The first of these was Alfred Kirchner’s production, which had its premiere on September 8, 2001. The premiere was generally well received by the public Read More …
At 129 rue Saint Antoine in the Marais district of Paris there is a small bakery and pastry shop with the marvelous name Aux Désirs de Manon, referring to the heroine of the novel Manon Lescaut by Abbé Prévost (1697-1763) — a novel which was the inspiration for operas by 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 …
Here it is, Milan’s legendary Teatro alla Scala, one of the world’s oldest (and newest) opera houses, first built in 1778, scene of the world premieres of operas by Rossini, Bellini, Verdi, Ponchielli, Boito, Puccini and many others. Some of the world’s greatest singers have performed here, like Maria Malibran Read More …
The one thing I really messed up on my visit to Milan in 2008 was that I didn’t see the exhibition Ricordi e i Fantastici 5 — and why not? Because I didn’t notice the little sticker saying it had been extended, so I thought it was all over before 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 …
Meiningen is a small city in southern Thüringen which advertises itself as “The Theater City.” It has an impressive theater building with six Corinthian columns, dating from the year 1909, and a unique theater tradition going back to the middle of the 19th century. From 1866 to 1914 Meiningen was Read More …
In 1958 the Austrian singer-songwriter Georg Kreisler (1922-2011), author of Lola Blau and the hilarious Opera Boogie, made a lot of enemies in this part of Germany with his song Gelsenkirchen, in which he portrayed this city as the home of “our unique fuel-democracy” where lovely black gases waft gracefully Read More …