Caffeine culture: There’s a lunchtime comic opera on the way for coffee lovers
Here’s a lovely excuse to nip out for some culture during your coffee break.
J.S. Bach’s Coffee Cantata, an eighteenth-century mini comic opera about the evils of coffee, will be performed at lunchtime in Nano Nagle Place on Douglas Street on October 12th.
It’s all part of the East Cork Early Music Festival, which promotes the performance of music written before 1750 on period instruments.
According to the show notes, the story sees Grouchy Schlendrian “trying to persuade his daughter Liesgen to give up her addiction to coffee, for fear she’ll never get a husband!”
It reads: “While we might think of coffee culture as being a recent thing, in 1740s Leipzig, when J.S. Bach was writing music, coffee was becoming such an obsession that women were repeatedly banned from coffee houses, and retaliated by setting up coffee-circles in their own homes.
“With coffee’s reputation as an aphrodisiac, plenty of working women also set up in the coffee houses in their own line of business.”
You can catch Schlendrian and Liesgen arguing about coffee and husbands at lunchtime 1pm on Friday, October 12th, in Nano Nagle Place, Douglas Street, tickets are €15 on the door.
Grab a great coffee at the Good Day Deli before the show and check out the rest of the Festival schedule here.
