On the morning of 30 April 1945, the same day that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in an underground bunker in Berlin, Major John Kramers of the US Army 103rd Infantry Division and his men called on the shuttered villa at Zöppritzstrasse 42 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps with a view to headquarter his men…
Month: November 2015
An Alpine Symphony
Shortly before the premiere in 1915 of his tone poem Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony), Richard Strauss (1869 – 1949) quipped “Now at last I have learned to orchestrate!”
Judgement Day
The great jazz composer, bandleader and notorious procrastinator, Duke Ellington once said “I don’t need time, I need a deadline”.
Death in Venice
In the third volume of his memoirs, An Orderly Man (1983), the actor Dirk Bogarde tells the story of the first screening for Warner Bros. studio executives of the film Death in Venice, directed by Luchino Visconti. Naturally they were curious to see how their money had been spent.