Dream interpretation is an ancient practice; dreams often puzzle us, and all cultures have sought to give them a meaning. They have often been interpreted as messages from the gods: now that Christmas is coming, let's remember that God told Joseph in a dream that the family had to leave to avoid the madness of Herod. However, the messages are rarely so clear and so [...]

The poet William Blake was also (or above all because he earned his living) an skilled engraver. He developed an engraving technique that enabled him to print his poems, illustrated by himself in colours so that the sheets made all the sense of being “printed manuscripts”. This technique allowed him to control the entire process of creating and editing the book [...]

One day at the last Schubertíada I was listening to Schubert’s Die abgeblühte Linde and a motif at the beginning of the second stanza (“Ändrung ist das Kind...”) sounded familiar to me. The second stanza's repetition brought to mind Brahms. These few notes reminded me of a phrase found in two Lieder (which we also heard at the Schubertíada): Sommerabend and Mondenschein [...]

In October 1924, an article about Gabriel Fauré was published in The Musical Quarterly. The author was the composer Aaron Copland, who through his composition hoped to introduce to the American academic community a work that was not widely known in his country at that time. A few weeks later, on November 9, the French composer would die.

The Grand Tour was a journey through Europe, with Italy as the final destination, that many young men from wealthy families used to do to round off their training and see the world. However, Thomas Moore's trip to Italy was motivated by a different motivation: to avoid the prison of creditors. Twenty-five years earlier, he had been given a position of responsibility in Bermuda [...]