Which building was inaugurated in a well-known Swiss town on 7th April, 1821 after being four years in the building.

6,6 with the fifth letter of the second word intersecting with the 'r' of Marie.

Harzer

It's the Palais Eynard:

http://www.ville-ge.ch/en/decouvrir/...chitecture.htm

Of course I had to Google this one, and this took quite a while.

Clue: This author (non European, 6, 7) was at one point much, much more controversial than he seems to be today. The title of one of his novels (4 words, 3, 5, 4, 4, and one of these words contains a punctuation mark) alludes to an action made by this historic (perhaps tragic but real) person (name of person = 7 letters) who was the last ruler of this city-state (7 letters).

2nd letter of first name of non-European author = "a"

To be a little more careful, I should say that the author was not born in Europe. I'm not sure what his nationality is.

Literature has always been (and always will be) my weakest subject. I'm making some wild guesses here:
city-state: Prussia?
historic person: Kaiser Wilhelm?

Can't figure out the author nor the novel. But not sure if my guesses above are even close or not.

Now that I'm thinking more about it, I'm pretty sure I'm way off. Oh well.

btw, 111op, which part of your trip did you like best? How are you enjoying the Beethoven CD?

I'll give you an obvious hint. The author was born in India. :-) If you couple this with what I've been doing, the answers will be obvious.

The trip was enjoyable but quite rushed. I don't think that I'm dying to see any of these places again. I'm definitely more of a city person -- Madrid would be nice to see again. It's the sort of city where people are still wandering about at 4 in the morning, when I was also out wandering about the night/morning before we left.

I haven't listened to the CDs that carefully. You can actually check out the CD offerings by Beethoven Haus here, so no need to go to Bonn:

http://www.beethoven-haus-bonn.de/si...0and%20CD-ROMs

The twofer I bought is the fourth listing.

I like the Bach Suite #1 quite a lot, but I've only listened to the whole thing rather quickly. Casals is characteristically quite "free." The performance seems more liberated and less romantic than the 30s performance on EMI/Naxos/various labels. Haven't listened too carefully to the rest to make an opinion just yet.

Salman Rushdie?
The Moor's Last Sigh?

not sure about the historic figure

Zogoiby?

Granada?

Everything is right except for the historic figure.

You probably went to work already. The "last Moor" is Boabdil.

Anyway, you can give the next clue.

This is a rather unfair clue, as I read about it recently in a local newspaper. I tried googling the answer and nothing comes out. But I'll try to give enough hints for you to figure the answers out.

Clue:
This American composer (6,9) will have a new opera premiered in 2007 by a US opera company.

The composer has been prolific and wrote many operas. 20 years ago he moved from NYC to Hollywood and worked in film orchestration for many blockbuster movies. Last year he moved back to NYC and now back working on classical music.

This new opera is based on the life of this european composer (4 letters) and his unfinished opera (4 letters).

The european composer died before he completed the opera. For 40 years the opera was performed with only the first 2 acts, as the composer's wife would not allow anyone to complete the opera. After her death, (5 letters) completed Act III.

Name:
American composer: 6,9 ("a" is 5th letter of first name)
European composer: 4
Unfinished opera: 4
Person who completed the opera: 5 ("a" is last letter)

"a" from Granada

Surprisingly I figured out part of it easily.

It's Berg's Lulu, completed by Cerha. I didn't know it was incomplete though.

http://www.andante.com/article/article.cfm?id=12939

I'll Google the American composer later.

The Am. composer is Thomas Pasatieri. I can't seem to include a link that does not require registration. Don't know this composer at all.

This shouldn't be too difficult if you follow the news.

Clue: Intellectual (name: 7, 7, last letter of last name = "a") born in (7 letters, not a European country) and father of (his ideas are frequently identified by this one word: 14 letters).

His star has been fading but he has been very much in the news again lately (for rather unfortunate reasons). At one point, especially influential in this American university (4 letters).

To explore his ideas, he coined a new word (10 letters), which differs from another common word (10 letters) by exactly one single letter.

The news article I read was in the Dallas Morning News. The following pasted is the first paragraph of the article:

< Fort Worth Opera will give the world premiere of a new opera by American composer Thomas Pasatieri in spring 2007. Titled Frau Margot, with a libretto by veteran stage director Frank Corsaro, it is loosely based on the true-life story of Austrian composer Alban Berg and his unfinished opera Lulu. >

Thanks. I still haven't listened to "Lulu" at all, but I think that I once tried listening to "Wozzeck" and I took it out of the CD player very soon. :-)

Hint to clue: The intellectual is in the news lately because he just died.

Jacques Derrida
Deconstruction
Yale
Not sure about the new word