Imagine being in a garden in the spring and realizing that the flowers have lost their colour and scent, the sun isn't as warm as expected, and the ground is dry. Imagine that you realize that there's nothing wrong with the spring, it's beautiful, as always. It's your gaze that has changed, it's your sadness that keeps you from seeing beauty.

Heinrich Panofka was best known as a voice teacher. In 1842, he founded an academy with tenor Marco Bordogni in Paris, and in 1855, he published his method, L'art de chanter. He was also renowned as a music critic; for example, he wrote in Schumann's "Neue Zeitschrift für Musik" or "Revue et gazette musicale" (where an article on Schubert in 1838, contributed to the [...]

Pianist Marion Stein was born in Vienna to a Jewish family in 1926. In 1938, they fled Austria for England, fleeing Nazism, and she studied at the Royal College of Music in London. She began a career as a concert pianist, which she abandoned at her 23 when she married George Lascelles, Earl of Harewood, and nephew of George VI. A common friend, Benjamin Britten [...]

In April 1770, then twenty-one years old, Johann Wolfgang Goethe arrived in Strasbourg to study law at the University. There he met someone who had a decisive influence on his training and poetry: Johann Gottfried Herder, only five years older than him. He introduced him to writers such as Homer and Shakespeare; he made him realize the importance of [...]

My dearest, as I promised you last week, I am sending you another musical postcard from my holiday spot. Many songs mention it, sometimes explicitly, and sometimes more hidden, like the song I am suggesting to you. The verses will be familiar to many of you, while the song is one of the most unknown by its author, Francis Poulenc.