Last week we talked about Antonín Dvořák's Cigánské Melodie, focusing on the author of the poems, Adolf Hayduk, and this week we'll listen to another song after talking about the tenor who commissioned them, Gustav Walter.

About a year and a half ago I wrote an introduction to Antonín Dvořák's Cigánské Melodie (or Zigeunerlieder, or Gypsy Songs). That introduction was necessarily brief, as it was for an article published in August about the Schubertiade concerts, and I thought I could spend this week and next talking a little more about the cycle and listening to two more songs from it.

In 1865, a girl named Animée Marie Marguerite Mercédès Larousse La Villette was born in Lorient, Brittany. Her mother, née Élodie Jacquier, was a painter, and her father was a military officer. The arts were very much alive in that household, and her parents encouraged the girl's musical inclinations (Rita, from here on).

In the poems of Winterreise we often find cinematic images. Not because Wilhelm Müller sought this effect, of course, but because we, having grown up watching films, see the scene in our minds. One of these images, one that moves me especially when I hear it at a recital, appears in Rückblick, which we can translate as "Looking Back."

Some time ago I titled an article about Hanns Sommer “The son of the photographer”. As I explained back then, it was a bit of a liberty, because I was referring to Sommer’s stepfather, the Voigtländer lens and camera maker. And since I allowed myself that liberty then, I can’t use the same title for this article about Franz Schreker, who really was the photographer’s son.