When I travel, I look for ghosts, where I can imagine a past in the present. Today's great cities do not have many ghosts, but a few do: I like to think Lisbon's Bairro Alto and Rome's Trastevere and Venice's Cannaregio still

How gay is opera? This idea is less interesting than the idea that gay culture has always loved the flamboyance of music hall, opera, musicals and certain contemporary female pop stars. In the late 19th century, and into the 20th, it was common for wealthy gay men and women to

This minor literary genre has a lengthy Wikipedia description! When I was young, I enjoyed Anthony Hope’s seminal The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), but these stories seem like nostalgic nonsense these days. They are usually set in the Balkans or Eastern Europe in fictional countries like “Ruritania” and they

Montmartre, literally "mountain of the martyr," where Saint Denis, Bishop of Paris, was beheaded around 250 AD. Not to be outdone, Denis picked up his head and walked to the top of the hill, preaching a sermon as he went. In his honor the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur

As the 19th century drew to a close, if dancing naked was symbolic of the New Woman, then its reversal also was possible - the adding of more layers. Repressed hysterics (or so they were "diagnosed") chose to push back this way. The most famous case study was Anna

Aubrey Beardsley illustrated Oscar Wilde's play Salomé: a tragedy in one act in 1894, although Wilde hated his illustrations as "too Japanese," whatever that means. They included the one above and the two below. Beardsley's excelled in erotic illustrations, however, like the hilarious ones

Céleste Mogador, real name Élisabeth-Céleste Vénard, was born in 1824 in Paris. The biographies say that at the age of 16, in order to escape an intolerable family situation, she registered as a courtesan and immediately regretted it, but couldn't get it reversed. The photo above is

Leave it to a Spanish painter (or Catalan) to return the favor and spell out what he really thought of the gloomy Tristan and Isolde myth - Salvador Dalí's satirical Tristan and Isolde. This painting began life as a small oil painting back in 1936-38, but it was

Life as opera! The Folies-Bergère is still around, but it was at the height of its fame and popularity from the 1890's through the 1920's. Visit today and you might see shows like Fantasma Circus Erotica, but most shows these days aren't erotica

Bizet married Geneviève Halévy in 1869 but the marriage was cut short when he died in 1875 from a heart attack at age 36, only three months after Carmen's opening. Halévy is shown in the lower image. This painting below of Halévy is by Jules-Élie Delaunay from

Wild women? Below is Klimt's famous Judith and Holofernes (1901). Below that is a later version Judith (1909). Or is it also Salome? Is that Holofernes' head or John the Baptist's head that she's holding on to? The first painting actually has a

Josephine Baker's story is an entire website to itself (celebrity entertainer, war hero, bisexual, etc.). She was born in 1906, moving from the U.S. to Paris in 1925, when she was 19. There she quickly became known as La Baker and elsewhere as the Black Pearl (take

* 1813 Richard Wagner born in Leipzig * 1821 Lola Montez born Eliza Rosanna Gilbert in Ireland * 1824 La Mogador born as Céleste Vénard in Paris * 1825 Prosper Mérimée’s Clara Gazul published * 1830 Mérimée hears Carmen story * 1833 George Sand/Mérimée fiasco * 1838 Georges Bizet born in Paris * 1842 Rienzi launches

There appear to be two versions of this painting around - presumably both by Joseph Stieler and commissioned by King Ludwig I. The one above (which I have cropped) is in the Schönheitengalerie (Gallery of Beauties), a collection of portraits in Schloss Nymphenburg in Munich. The one below, however, apparently did

As one ardent fan wrote, “Lola Montez was an enchantress. There was about her something provoking and voluptuous which drew you. Her skin was white, her wavy hair like tendrils of the woodbine, her eyes tameless and wild, her mouth like a budding pomegranate. Add to that a dashing figure,

What happens to the lead female characters in 19th century opera is depressing - how could audiences approve of the (frequently violent) deaths of Carmen, Violetta, Manon, Isolde, Tosca and countless others? At best, these librettos were critiques of awful men and wonderful women and a rigid class system under tremendous

This was once thought of as a photo of the execution, but it is now said to be a film reconstruction in 1920. They seem to have captured the horror of the moment. She was executed by firing squad on 15 October 1917 at the age of 41. The location

Lola Montès was Max Ophuls' last film (in 1955) and though some critics love it, I don't think it compares well with his earlier masterpieces, Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) and La Ronde (1950). The biggest problem is that there is no sense of the erotic

Wild and wonderful women... Mazeppa began its career as an epic poem by Byron in 1819, based on existing legends, the story of a page caught in an affair with a married woman from a higher class. When the affair is discovered, the outraged husband has him tied to the

Bizet's Carmen is based on Prosper Mérimée's novella of 1845. Mérimée visited Spain multiple times before writing Carmen and he devoted considerable time and effort into researching the costumbrismo (folklore) of Andalusia - Gypsies, bandits, bullfighters, cigarette girls, witches, highwaymen, and so on, that became the background

Hermann Hesse is covered more fully here but his ideas about the futility of art and literature after the catastrophe of World War I can be found in Klingsor’s Last Summer (1919) and again later in The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel, 1943). Here he could have been talking

Natalie Barney once wrote: “My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.” In 1900, she published Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes, a collection of love poems to women, which was suitably scandalous, if not great poetry. Soon after, her father died and left her a

Ludwig II's grandest creation was Neuschwanstein Castle (Schloss Neuschwanstein), literally "New Swan on the Rock palace." The colorized postcard below is from around 1900; Ludwig had died in 1886. Within its walls are many paintings depicting scenes from Wagner's operas. The postcards below, from

Wagner and Orientalism During the 1850’s, Wagner became very interested in Orientalism – Brahmanism and Buddhism – primarily, it seems, for their notions of samsara and nirvana. They provided the philosophical underpinnings for operas like Parsifal, which he first began writing in 1857, unfinished operas like Die Sieger (The Victors) and,