If you like astronomy and observe the starred sky, the name Betelgeuse will sound familiar to you. You know that it's a star in the Orion constellation that can be seen with the naked eye, that it's clearly distinguished by its red light, and that can be seen now in winter if we are in the Northern Hemisphere. You would also know that it's about 600 light-years away, about 600 times greater than the Sun and very cold (about 3500 K, 2000 K less than the Sun); that it's only 8 million years old, and, despite this, it will not last one more a million years.

I hesitated whether to share Die Löwenbraut or not, because its duration goes far beyond the usual two or four minutes; it even goes beyond the six minutes of The Swimmer, last week's song. However, I think this song is interesting and I hope I will be able to encourage you to take a pause and listen to it.

Another year has passed and this week marks the 9th anniversary of Liederabend. I won't say the year has passed very quickly, on the contrary; it coincided exactly with the pandemic year (just one year ago, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was cancelled amid great controversy) and this time has been long, exhausting, sad and confusing. In consequence, Liederabend went through fire and water, like everybody, I guess. I imagine that my posts always reflect my mood, but since this time the mood is collective, who knows, maybe someday we will go through the [...]

In 1774, in a city that probably was Linz, a child named Marianne was born; as the father was unknown, she took the surname of her mother, actress Elisabeth Pingruber. Four years later, the mother married Joseph Georg Jung and, although the man didn't adopt her, the child became also known as Marianne Jung. In 1798, after Herr Jung's death, mother and daughter moved to Frankfurt, where the girl, now a ballet dancer, captivated the audience; her admirers included Catharina Elisabeth Goethe, the mother of our Goethe, and Clemens Brentano, co-author of [...]

It is quite common that the poetic voice in love songs is addressed to a lover who is far away; literally, for example, in Beethoven's cycle An die ferne Geliebte. When lovers need a messenger to convey words and feelings, Romantic poetry gives it the form of an element of nature that covers the distance between them. Sometimes it's a bird or some other flying creature (a bee or a butterfly, for instance); sometimes, clouds; sometimes, a brook, and sometimes, as we will see in this article, the wind.