Gelnhausen Concert Coverage and Town Photos from last Saturday!

This past weekend my colleagues and I sang in a concert located in the neighboring town of Gelnhausen  The concert served to promote the upcoming Opernakademie performance of Rossini's Barber of Seville, and to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Opernakademie Bad Orb, and all the hard work and dedication that has gone into producing successful summer Opera performances year after year.  Since 1986 in July and August international emerging artists come to Bad Orb specifically because of its wonderful reputation for putting on quality performances, allowing younger singers to sing important roles for future use in developing their career, and its well-known capacity for acting as a platform from which these emerging artists receive opportunities to take on larger projects at important opera houses in Germany and internationally.

Therefore, there was quite a lot to celebrate at this past Saturday's concert, and we all had a wonderful time, however, as is now normal seemingly, my lack of performance photo skills has turned out to have yielded me exactly zero photos of my colleagues or myself in our performance attire! As exasperated as you may be at this moment, I am hoping this next piece of news might soften the blow a bit.  I do have a consolation prize for all of you since I know that photos are important when giving a sense of atmosphere to a place: I have posted below a bunch of photos of my walk through the town of Gelnhausen in the hours before the concert took place Saturday night.   So, at least you're not reading this article and going away empty-handed! ;)  And, I have captioned each picture so that you can get an idea of what you're looking at- plus, I even hyperlinked the title of this blog post, so if you click on the blog post title, you will be taken to the webpage for the town of Gelnhausen itself, if you'd like to get more info on it for future reference.  Okay, enjoy!

This was a tower where in the Middle Ages they actually used to burn witches at the stake. Thank goodness that nowadays we have feminism and have ditched that custom, otherwise who knows if I'd still be here (eek!)!

This gate in the center of the picture was part of the old town wall in the Middle Ages- it was a lookout post, presumably.

A look up one of the streets towards the Marienkirche in the center of the old part of town.

Part of the 'Markplatz' (which is used as a parking place when the open-air market isn't taking place) and the Marienkirche (Catholic and from the Medieval Ages) is in the background.

More beautiful 'Fachwerkhaeuser'.

Another angle of the open-air marketplace transformed into a parking place in its off-hours.

This is actually a bust of the original European inventor of the telephone,  Johann Reis, who was born in Gelnhausen, and you can read about him more on Wikipedia by clicking here.

A very skinny street! Certainly not a two-way....!

I love Medieval door hinges!!

This was only a fraction of the large staircase leading from the Marktplatz up to the Marienkirche.

The organ in the Marienkirche and part of my finger...sorry but it was tough to take a pic without flash and have it come out clear, let alone worry about silly things like fingers in the photo.... :P

The main altar inside the Marienkirche.

This is the 'engste Strasse' which means 'skinniest street' and which was used during the  Middle Ages to connect the two main trade centers of Leipzig and Frankfurt, and to find out more, but in German, click here.

The Marienkirche from the opposite side.

The towers, or 'Türme' from the Marienkirche.

Me sitting on a bench in the 'engste Strasse'.

This is painted on one of the buildings on the 'engste Strasse' and it says , "From Leipzig on the Pleisse (a river name presumably) to Frankfurt on the Main (definitely a river name), this is the skinniest street from the entire trip, and so the width of this street was used as the measurement of how wide the wagons were allowed to be loaded (so that they could pass through here)."