The State Opera in Prague (Státní Opera Praha) has the most dreadful location of any opera house I can think of. The front entrance is cut off from the city by a high-speed four-lane motorway called Wilsonova with no pedestrian crossing, just a dark narrow tunnel that looks like the Read More …
The German dramatist, poet and historian Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) spent the summer of 1785 in a farmhouse in what was then the village of Gohlis, near Leipzig. At that time, Schiller presumably had a better view from his bedroom window than I did when I visited in 2005. Of course Read More …
On the Schillerplatz in the center of Stuttgart there is an exhibition of historical musical instruments. While this collection is not as large as the ones in Brussels, Berlin, Nürnberg or Paris, it is still well worth seeing and has interesting explanations of why certain Baroque instruments went out of fashion, Read More …
>> Frankfurt Skyline Countdown # 3 << Frankfurt’s third tallest building (208 meters, 53 floors) is named after its address, Westendstraße 1. Actually, the main entrance is around the corner at Mainzer Landstrasse 58, near Platz der Republik. The building was completed in 1993. This is part of Read More …
During his long career, Giuseppe Verdi composed twenty-six operas — or twenty-eight, depending what you count as what. The following list is the 28-opera version, with the year of the world premiere in parentheses after each title. I have listed the opera titles in different colors: Red means I have Read More …
One thing I’ll say for the Lyon opera house: you can’t mistake it for any other building in Lyon, or for any other opera house in the world that I know of. Or do you know of any other building that has a nineteenth century façade topped by a huge 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 …
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 …
My recent visit to Weimar was ‘between the years’, as the Germans would say (meaning in the week between Christmas and New Year’s), so the square in front of the German National Theater (Deutsches Nationaltheater = DNT) was filled with an ice-skating rink and some remaining stands from the Christmas Read More …
This invigorating Flemish city is called Gent in Dutch, Ghent in English, Gand in French and Gante in Spanish. The Spanish ruled Flanders for many years, which is why they have their own names for some of the cities. The Spanish King Charles V in fact was born in Gante Read More …