In 2005, I took a Regional Express train from Frankfurt to Fulda, and then started cycling along the regional bicycle route R1 down the Fulda River Valley. It was a cool, overcast day, which was fine for cycling but not ideal for taking pictures. I arrived two years too late Read More …
Hippophagy, meaning the eating of horse meat, wasn’t even legal in France until 1866, although there was a black market for horse meat long before that, especially in times of crisis. According to the French historian Sylvain Leteux, horse meat lost its taboo status and became a popular food in France Read More …
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 …
This audience at the Opéra Bastille in Paris turned out to be highly enthusiastic, rewarding all four of the lead singers in Verdi’s Troubadour with bravos and prolonged applause after their main arias. There’s a special word for this in German, Szenenapplaus (literally ‘scene applause’ but I don’t know of 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 …
Berlin is the only German city that has three full-scale professional opera houses. This one is called the Komische Oper or ‘Comic Opera’, but that doesn’t mean everything they do is hilariously funny. The name Komische Oper was originally meant to suggest that this opera house (like the Opera Comique in 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 …