The town of Friedrichsdorf (= “Friedrich’s village”), Germany, was founded in 1687 by Huguenots, French Protestants who had fled to escape religious prosecution in France. They were invited to settle here by the local ruler, Friedrich II (1633-1708), who at the time was the Landgraf of a small, impoverished and Read More …
The opera house in Nancy is on an elegant public square called Place Stanislas, which was designed and built in the 1750s on orders of the Duke of Lorraine, Stanislas Leszczynski. The buildings on the four sides of Place Stanislas all have similar neo-classical façades, and two of the corners 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 …
The Théâtre Royal de Liège, home of the Royal Opera of the Wallonia, was closed for several years to be reconstructed and enlarged. When I was there in 2011, I had the impression that the original building would be dwarfed by the new tower for stage machinery which was under Read More …
Castelvecchio, the Old Castle, was built by the Scala family during the 14th century when they were the rulers of Verona. It became their residence and fortress during the rule of Cangrande II in 1354. Cangrande, appropriately enough, translates as “top dog”. Like most buildings that are now called the Read More …
The State Opera in Stuttgart has a great reputation for high quality, innovative opera productions. I have seen quite a few operas in Stuttgart, including L’italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algeria) by Gioacchino Rossini, The Coronation of Poppea by Claudio Monteverdi, Die Walküre by Richard Wagner and Doktor Read More …
Saarbrücken is the capital of the Saarland and is located on the Saar River near the French border. After the First and Second World Wars this area came under French administration. In 1935 and in 1955 referendums were held, and in both cases a majority voted to re-join Germany (90% Read More …
For the large formal gardens behind his palace at Versailles, King Louis XIV commissioned dozens of white marble statues showing healthy young women with good posture, many of them dressed in nothing more than a bed sheet wrapped around them in some suggestive way. To avoid giving the impression that Read More …
In September 2011 I paid all of five Euros and got the next-to-last standing room ticket for the premiere of the opera Salomé by Richard Strauss (1864-1949). This was the first performance of the 2011-2012 opera season in Paris. The standing room tickets are not sold in advance, but go Read More …
The Salzburg Festival is one of the world’s largest and most intensive summer music and drama festivals, with more than two hundred performances packed into six weeks in July and August each summer. I have never attended any of these performances, both because they are beyond my price range and Read More …