- Details
Let me pose a game: if I say "Valentine's Day", what are your first thoughts? About Valentine's Day? About film noir? About Some like it hot? About Ophelia? About Ophelia and Brahms? If that's your answer, I hope you are aware that you're sicker with Art Song than you thought. Join the club!Yes, Johannes Brahms wrote five songs based on the texts that Ophelia sings in the fifth scene of the fourth act in Hamlet; those songs are known today as Ophelia-Lieder, WoO22. It draws our attention that the whole cycle lasts no more than three minutes. We can understand this brevity better if we bear in mind that, in fact, Brahms didn't intend to write a song cycle but some incidental music, that is, music to be played during a play.
- Details
Time and again, if I raise my eyes from my notebook, I see (according to Mr Google) yellow-legged gulls, that is, huge seagulls, perched on a near house, waiting for anything edible. When they leave, pigeons may come, but they won't stay there together: pigeons learned years ago, that they should flee from gulls. At home, there are also blackbirds and a few birds whose name I don't know: They are small as sparrows but slimmer, naughtier and noisier. Collared doves also approach, but they are more cautious. When I go out, I'll see pigeons, monk parakeets (again I googled) and sparrows on the street; perhaps a magpie, and little more. But one day, I saw a crow. And when my brain got to terms with that information, I stopped and turned around. The crow was still there, pecking, surrounded by pigeons, and someone as startled as I was, took a picture. I don't know [...]
- Details
Today I'm bringing a birthday cake with five candles to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Liederabend. Five years of weekly meetings for sharing songs and stories around these songs. What could I say? I'm so happy! Thank you all for being there! As usually, this anniversary post will be about what happened on this site during the last year. Our starting point: the deciphering of the traditional "mysterious" numbers that head this post.- Details
Here one more letter in my Liederabend's alphabet, H is for humour. Yes, you’ve read that right, humour, sense of humour. I know, most of the songs we usually hear here are sad, or very sad, or rapturous, or solemn; Romantics didn't have much of a sense of humour, and poets were engaged in serious, deep thoughts. But even they couldn't occasionally help laughing! Also, we’ve often listened to an English or French song, and they usually make us laugh more than a German song. So today we're stopping to go over those fun songs that cheered us up among so much darkness.
- Details
By 1933, Erich Korngold had spent several years mainly working on operettas; making some adaptations in collaboration with the theatre director Max Reinhardt. He was a bit fed up with that because so many trips and rehearsals prevented him from writing his own music. However, on the other hand, it was financially worthwhile; thank to that money, he could get married and, that year, he bought a house in the Alps which became his refuge. That summer, taking advantage of a break between operettas, the composer wrote a song cycle, Unvergänglichkeit, op. 27, with poems of Eleonore van der Straten, which was premiered in Vienna in 1937.
Series
