"TO: by train. AROUND: by bicycle or boat." Nemorino's Profile

Toulon and Marseille, France

Hello, my name's Don. I'm an American living in Frankfurt am Main, Land Hessen, Germany, where I teach, ride a bicycle and go to the opera.

My newest page here on VirtualTourist is about a small German city called Friedrichsdorf, which was founded in 1687 by Huguenots, French Protestants who had fled from France to escape religious prosecution. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Friedrichsdorf was best known as the town where Philipp Reis invented the telephone in 1861.

My second newest page gets its name from a chorus in Bizet’s opera Carmen: la chose enivrante: la liberté ! la liberté ! But it deals with a city that is not famous as a place of liberty, rather as the site of an infamous prison colony, the bagne, which was vividly described by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables – the city of Toulon in the South of France.

My third newest page is called Carmen and the Count of Monte Cristo. It deals with another city in the South of France where I also saw the opera Carmen, namely Marseille.

Some of my other recent pages are about the Belgian (Flemish) cities of Antwerp, Ghent and Brugge, as well as the German city of Osnabrück and the Dutch cities of Maastricht and Groningen.

Tân Ba, Vietnam, 1964

Although most of my VirtualTourist pages are about cities in Europe, I have also written some pages about Vietnam, where I served as an American soldier (not voluntarily) in 1964/65. Thirty years later I returned with one of my sons for another look.

My Biên Hòa page is actually about a beautiful village called Tân Ba, where I spent several months in the 1960s and received a surprisingly warm welcome when I returned in 1995.

My Tinh Binh Duong page is about our zone headquarters at Phước Vĩnh, where I spent several months working as a radio operator.

My Ho Chi Minh City page is about my fifteen visits to the city that used to be called Saigon.

My small Xuân Lộc page is about the place where I spent my last five weeks as an American soldier in Vietnam.

Finally, my Vietnam page is about some places in Vietnam that I was unable to visit in the 1960s but saw for the first time in 1995, such as Da Lat, Nha Trang, Hoi An, Hanoi, Hue, the Cu Chi tunnels and the Mekong Delta.

In 2013 I went through my Vietnam pages (except Xuan Loc, which only has two tips) and linked the tips on each page, so they can easily be read in chronological order.

The Frankfurt Opera

Now it’s official! The Frankfurt Opera is the world’s best!

In April 2013 the first International Opera Awards ceremony was held in London. Awards were given in twenty-three categories. The award for the best opera company went to the Frankfurt Opera, thus confirming what a lot of us here in Frankfurt have been saying all along.

So far nine visiting VirtualTourist members have come to the opera with me here in Frankfurt:

• gildapaolina (Gil) from Italy, was here on business and came with me to a performance of Fidelio by Ludwig van Beethoven.

• American opera buff yooperprof (Chet) has been here twice so far, for the operas Macbeth -- but the one by Ernest Bloch, not Verdi -- and later Verdi's Don Carlos.

• Australian VT member iandsmith (Ian Smith) came along to a performance of Elektra by Richard Strauss, as staged by the German playwright Falk Richter.

• German members tini58de (Christine) and Madschick (Heinz) from Karlsruhe were here for a performance of Mozart's Magic Flute. Christine has posted a nice travelogue about this called 2007: Magic at the Opera.

• Greek VT member sinequanon (Gala) from Athens came with me to see Puccini's Tosca.

• Natrix (Natascha), who lives just up the road in Friedberg, came along to a performance of Verdi's La Traviata.

• Gypsystravels (Janet) from New York came with us -- me and some of the people from my English language opera appreciation course Frankfurt OperaTalk -- to the opera La Bohème by Giacomo Puccini.

• alza (Lou) from North America joined me at the Frankfurt Opera for a performance of The Tales of Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach. This nineteenth century French opera features a life-size mechanical doll that can sing, dance, bow, roll her eyes and even speak ("oui"), so it was appropriate that a week before attending the opera we went to the German Mechanical Instrument Museum in Bruchsal and saw hundreds of ingenious self-playing clockwork musical devices, many of them made in Jacques Offenbach's own lifetime (1819-1880).

Who's next?

Busseto, Italy

The great nineteenth century opera composers Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner were both born in 1813, so 2013 is their joint bicentenary.

In preparation for the Verdi bicentenary, I have updated my VirtualTourist page on his home town of Busseto in the north of Italy. I have connected the tips, cleaned up the formatting, repaired broken links and added a new link to the National Museum Giuseppe Verdi, which didn’t even exist when I visited Busseto in 2008.

My Busseto intro page includes an annotated list of Verdi’s twenty-eight operas, with links to some of my other VirtualTourist pages and tips where I have discussed them in more detail.

My most detailed Verdi page is the one on Bregenz, where I was able to make seventeen Favorites aka General Tips recounting the story of Verdi’s opera Il trovatore (The Troubadour), along with an unusual security precaution that I have never seen at any other opera venue.

As for Wagner, I have also made an annotated list of his operas and put it in a new album here at the bottom of my homepage.

The Semper Opera in Dresden

At last count there were eighty-eight functioning professional opera houses in Germany (more than in any other country in the world, I believe), as listed in the Yearbook of Opernwelt magazine for 2012.

I have seen performances in fifty-six of these opera houses so far. I hope to get around to the other thirty-two in the next few years -- before their funding dries up.

In my album Opera Houses in Germany I have listed the fifty-six that I have been to so far.

Place de la Bastille, Paris

When VirtualTourist announced the results of the second annual Barney Awards last October, I was gratified to learn that my Paris page had been chosen as the “Best City Travel Page” for 2012.

Thanks, everybody!

In 2012 I added sixty-four new tips/reviews to my Paris page. I have linked most of these together in loops, so if you just want to look at one loop at a time you can easily do so by clicking on the link at the bottom of each tip:

• Twenty-two new Paris tips from July 2012, including a cruise on the Canal Saint Martin, Arletty, Beaumarchais and the Grand Gallery of Evolution.

• Twenty-four new Paris tips from June 2012, including the Rodin Museum, a concert at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, some views from the Arch of Triumph and a boat trip on the Seine.

• Seventeen new Paris tips from January 2012, including Quasimodo’s Notre-Dame, the Museum of the Middle Ages and the huge Ancient Egyptian department of the Louvre.

The Frankfurt Opera

Quiz results

Congratulations to the winners of the two quizzes that I conducted when I first joined VirtualTourist to celebrate the Grand Opening of my New Homepage.

As a PRIZE, each winner will receive a free ticket to the Frankfurt Opera (third balcony) for a performance of her choice within the next twenty years -- preferably on a day when I am in town so I can come along.

Quiz #1
The QUESTION for Quiz #1 was:
What is the origin of my member name "Nemorino"?

The winner is lacristina of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, who wrote: Guten tag, buon giorno, and I'm sure it has been a beautiful day in Chicago. Are you fond of Donizetti? And elixers? Do they sing Italian opera in Italian or German in Frankfurt? Have I found you out?

Which indeed she has, since Nemorino is a character in Gaetano Donizetti's comic opera L'elisir d'amore, which I have seen numerous times here in Frankfurt am Main (also in Darmstadt, Gießen, Halle, Paris and Vienna) over the past few years.

Nemorino in this opera is a guy who does everything wrong but gets the girl anyway, which is more or less the story of my life up to now, so I decided that might make an appropriate member name.

Quiz #2
The QUESTION this time was:
What is the origin of my motto?
My motto at that time was: It’s a beautiful day in Chicago!

This one took a bit longer, so I eventually dropped a hint on my Chicago page: "It comes from the most popular program in the history of American radio."

Shortly after that I got some answers, and the winner was tini58de of Karlsruhe, Germany.

A mere two and a half years later -- well within the twenty-year time limit! -- she came to Frankfurt with her husband Heinz (Madschick) and we went to Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. Christine has posted a travelogue about this called 2007: Magic at the Opera.

Back in 2004 she won the prize by writing: I used your pages and hints, google and especially American friends' help from another forum. And this is what we found out: Everett Mitchell, who more than sixty years ago began a radio broadcast with these famous words: "It's a beautiful day in Chicago!"

Yes, indeed. Everett Mitchell was the host of the nationally broadcast NBC radio program called (deep breath here) THE NATIONAL FARM AND HOME HOUR. It came on every Saturday at 12 noon and was broadcast live from WMAQ's legendary Studio A on the twentieth floor of the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, with a live band and a studio audience.

The ritual was that after the band had finished playing their opening march music -- The Stars and Stripes Forever by John Philip Sousa (1854-1932), a march better known to us grade-school twerps as Be kind to your web-footed friends for that duck may be somebody's mother -- Everett Mitchell would step up to the microphone and say:

"It's a beautiful day in Chicago!"

Of course he would usually have to qualify that in some way, for instance:

"Well, it is a bit on the cloudy side, and there's some rain and thunder and sleet and hailstorms and gale-force winds and slush piling up on the streets" or whatever the weather was like in Chicago on that particular day. Then he always said:

"But it's a great day to be alive, and we hope it's even more beautiful wherever you are."

At which point I usually turned off the big Zenith radio in the living room and went outside to play, since I was a suburban child with absolutely no interest in the week's agricultural news, I just wanted to hear the opening ritual.

When I was six or seven years old I pestered my mother for weeks about it, and she finally took me down to the Merchandise Mart on the El (we lived in Evanston) so I could be in the studio audience and see a live performance of the show. Everett Mitchell was rather more corpulent that I had imagined, but otherwise I was very impressed. From that day on I was determined to be a radio announcer when I grew up, and in fact I later did spend several years working as the news director of a California radio station.

For more information on Everett Mitchell and the National Farm and Home Hour, have a look at my Chicago page.