Wagner’s operas are an acquired taste, and it took me about a decade to acquire. Not only was Wagner one of the two most influential opera composers of the nineteenth century, he was also a huge influence on Hitler and the rise of the Nazi party in the twentieth. The Read More …
On this house by the Quellenpark (Spring Park) in Bad Soden there are two different plaques, both with the momentous information that the opera composer Richard Wagner slept here on the night of August 12-13, 1860, which was his “first night on German soil” after “eleven years of exile from Read More …
Lake Lucerne in central Switzerland has always seemed mysterious to me because of its German name Vierwaldstättersee, which looks as though it ought to mean ‘Four-Woods-Place-Lake.’ But it turns out that Waldstätte is simply an old-fashioned regional word for Canton, and the name Vierwaldstättersee means that the lake used to Read More …
When I arrived in Luzern (aka Lucerne) I was surprised to see a sign pointing to a Richard Wagner Museum. I had come to Luzern to see an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, and had completely forgotten that Wagner lived here off and on during his long exile from Germany resulting Read More …
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 …