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 …
The Düsseldorf opera house is an inconspicuous building located on a major street which is now called Heinrich-Heine-Allee, a name it received in 1963. Before that it had several different names, depending on who was in power at the time. Under the Nazis it was called Hindenburgwall after Paul von Read More …
This distinguished gentleman casting a skeptical eye at Berlin’s largest opera house is none other than the great English playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616), whose bust was given to the city of Berlin by the city of London on the occasion of Berlin’s 750th birthday. Up to now I have only Read More …
Copenhagen’s fantastic new opera house is called “Operaen”, which simply means “The Opera” because the -en ending is the definite article in Danish. Operaen was built in only three years, from 2001 to 2004, on an island in the Holmen district of Copenhagen. The site for Operaen was carefully chosen Read More …
Detmold is a city of fewer than 75,000 people which inherited its theater, but not much else, from the former Principality of Lippe. This tiny principality had Detmold as its ‘capital city’ for centuries until the last ruling prince, Leopold IV, was forced to abdicate at the end of the Read More …
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 …
My immediate reason for going to Dortmund in 2011 was that I really wanted to see Katharina Thoma’s highly praised new staging of the opera L’Eliogabalo by the early Baroque Italian composer Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676). It turned out they were doing Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman the night before, Read More …
Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland and the Isles, was executed in 1587 at Castle Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire on orders of her cousin, Queen Elisabeth the First of England. In real life the two queens never met. But they do meet sometimes on the opera stage, in the second act of Read More …
Würzburg is a city of 130,000 people, located on the Main River not quite 220 kilometers upstream from Frankfurt. There are fine bicycle paths all along the river, so it’s no problem getting here. And if you’re in a hurry, there are about thirty-seven trains per day in each direction, Read More …
This is a city-owned theater with its own opera ensemble, orchestra and chorus. I have only seen one opera here so far, namely Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) by Richard Wagner (1813-1883), which I have also seen numerous times in Frankfurt am Main, Wiesbaden, Mainz and Dortmund. The Flying Read More …