An Evening in Frankfurt

Germany has many old concert halls, but one of the ones I’ve most enjoyed visiting was the Alte Oper in Frankfurt. I went there for a piano concert, but I got there a couple hours early, so I spent the time walking around the city. First, I stopped at the local Haus des Döners, which I hadn’t realized was such a large chain. Of all the cities I’ve been to in Germany, Frankfurt felt the largest and most city-like. I would compare it to New York, with all the large skyscrapers and terrible air quality. Despite that, it was still a nice city, and the area the Opera house was in was really nice.

Photo of the Frankfurt skyline

The Alte Oper in Frankfurt

The opera house itself was originally opened in 1880, and was mainly used as the name suggests, for operas, until it was destroyed by air raids in 1944. Afterwards, the opera moved to a different building, and there were no plans to rebuild the Alte Oper for a while. However, Frankfurt citizens cooperated to raise money to repair the opera house beginning in 1953. It wasn’t until 1964 that enough money had been raised to begin repairing the Alte Oper, but it did eventually reopen in 1981. Now it serves mainly as a concert hall for both classical and more modern music, as opposed to the opera performances it used to be known for.

Concert hall in the Alte Oper

The concert hall itself was really nice, with a beautiful pipe organ setup behind the piano. The pianist I went to see was Igor Levit, who is mostly known for his performances of Bach, Beethoven, and Liszt. He was performing a set of Brahms Ballades (op. 10), and Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony for piano. The second piece was particularly interesting to go see, because as well as being an incredibly challenging and beautiful piece of music, it is rarely performed. Everyone knows Beethoven’s symphonies, especially the 5th, even if they don’t know them by name. However, Liszt’s transcriptions were almost never performed in the couple hundred years since he wrote them. Part of that was how difficult they were, but transcriptions also tend to be performed less than works written for the piano originally. The first recording of them was in 1967 by Glenn Gould, who was known for his unconventional approach to classical music, and since then there have only been a handful of people who have performed any of the transcriptions. Overall, the performance was really beautiful, and the whole trip to Frankfurt was very fun.

-Sam