The father of Mieczysław Weinberg arrived in Warsaw fleeing from the pogrom of Kishinev (then in the Russian Empire) in 1905, where his father and grandfather had died. More than thirty years later, Mieczysław was the only survivor of his family; He was able to escape from the Warsaw Ghetto, while his parents and his sister were killed in the Trawniki concentration camp in 1943. He settled in the USSR, where his father-in-law was murdered in 1948 by Stalin's secret police, and he was [...]

Singing that spread its wings, like a bird; wings that give shelter to us and a voice that transports us to paradise. A poet, Heinrich Heine, who suggests idyllic images and a composer, Felix Mendelssohn, who set them into music.

Can you separate the art from the artist? A few months ago, I listened to a radio program (Musiques empoderades, Catalunya Música) where this matter was discussed. Some guests thought that the work doesn't necessarily reflect the darkest aspects of the creator's life, while others maintained that the work is part of life, and that both are inseparable.

Something happened to me this week that had never happened: once the article was written, I realized that I didn't have the lyrics of the song, and I wasn't able to find it anywhere. You're probably thinking that I should have checked the poem before, and you're right; I'm afraid I was overconfident. Mental note: Don't start an article before you're sure you have the poem of the song. The point is, I can't post a song without the lyrics, and here I am [...]

In 1803, a play called Lacrimas was published in Berlin. The plot was complex and implausible as the plots of Shakespearean comedies, disseminated at that time in Germany thanks to the translations of August Wilhelm Schlegel. There were misunderstandings, impossible love between Muslims and Christians, and sudden plot twists that changed the parents or religion of some characters, so that love stories had a happy ending and peace and fraternity reigned between them.