If we speak about Heine's Lieder, that is, about songs written after poems by Heine, the name of two composers comes immediately to mind: Schubert and Schumann. Schubert, who only left a small and magnificent sample of six Lieder after poems by Heine before his death, and Schumann, who twelve years later composed around forty songs, among them two cycles as important as Dichterliebe and Liederkreis, Op. 24.

Joseph Marx, born in Graz (Austria) in 1882, experienced a similar situation to that of so many young people of his time, of decades later and, even, of our time: when a child, it was evident that he was a gifted musician; later, he became an excellent pianist who aspired to be a composer, but his father wanted him to study something more important as law. As many other young person back then and now , he wasted his time in the classroom until he left his career to study Philosophy and Art History; by 1909 [...]

Simon Keenlyside was so kind as to accept a four-hands interview with friend Alejandro Martínez in 2013. Nine years later I've had the pleasure of talking with him again about Art Song. I'm sharing his thoughts with my readers, splitting the conversation in two weeks. I hope you'll find it as interesting as I did. Once again, thank you very much, Simon, for your time.

Is there any internal logic in Myrten that allows this work to be considered as a cycle? I don't have the answer to this question, but at least I can set out some ideas just as an excuse to listen to one of my favourite songs in that cycle. Schumann composed Myrten as a wedding present for his fiancée Clara Wieck. He began to write in February 1840, when the wedding date wasn't chosen yet, and ended the last song in May, still without a wedding date due to Clara's father opposition to that [...]