A poem whose stanzas all have the same regular structure seem suitable for a strophic song. Even more if it’s a lullaby. The composer will surely consider that five stanzas are long enough; or perhaps not, and he will put performers and audience to test by repeating six of the eight verses of each stanza. This is our Schubert! Either the 19th-century audience was more patient than we are or he thought he was more than capable of making a pure strophic song which lasted seven or eight minutes and flew by as they were two, as it's Wiegenlied, D 867 (He must have been pleased [...]

At 3 years old, he asked his mother: “Why is music laughing? Why is music crying? This smart child went into the Würzburg Conservatory in 1922, at twelve, and at seventeen, after meeting Richard Strauss, he knew he wanted to become a conductor. Shortly afterwards, he was assistant conductor at the city's opera house, where he conducted Hugo Wolf's only opera, Der Corregidor, and when the theatre closed down he held the same position in Aachen, where he worked with Alban Berg and Belà Bartók.

For the past few weeks, many discussions have been held on social media about the cultural sector, so severely affected by lockdown measures for protecting us against the Covid-19 infection. I would say that the scope of the problem is better understood when talking of the book sector, maybe because it's “easier” (don't miss the inverted commas) to focus on the four agents concerned: authors, publishers, distributors and bookshops. However, it looks as if many users involved in those discussions are not able to see the scope of the problem when talking about [...]

In Catalonia, St. George's Day is a day for kissing and hugging, for expressing sincere joy, for caressing and strolling through the crowd. There is nothing more alien to St George's Day than keeping social distance and wearing sanitary gloves and masks. Still, this year the streets will be empty and quiet. In fact, the best-case scenario is that we'll order our books online and will pick them up in our bookshop someday, and for the first time in many years there will be no roses in our vases. At least, we can have some virtual roses, so one more year I'd like to you have my musical rose.

[...] And if Ruhe, meine Seele, is an atypical poem for Strauss, so is the music. Think of Strauss' lieder: catching, broad melodies, often with operatic reminiscences. Quite the opposite of what we find in this song: a tune that slips when we try to get it, some declaimed verses which have something of hypnotic. The first verses of the poem tell us about the reigning calm, “Not a breeze is stirring lightly", and this calm is reflected by the voice and the sober accompaniment, agitated only when the poem speaks about [...]