The poet William Blake was also (or above all because he earned his living) an skilled engraver. He developed an engraving technique that enabled him to print his poems, illustrated by himself in colours so that the sheets made all the sense of being “printed manuscripts”. This technique allowed him to control the entire process of creating and editing the book [...]

One day at the last Schubertíada I was listening to Schubert’s Die abgeblühte Linde and a motif at the beginning of the second stanza (“Ändrung ist das Kind...”) sounded familiar to me. The second stanza's repetition brought to mind Brahms. These few notes reminded me of a phrase found in two Lieder (which we also heard at the Schubertíada): Sommerabend and Mondenschein [...]

In October 1924, an article about Gabriel Fauré was published in The Musical Quarterly. The author was the composer Aaron Copland, who through his composition hoped to introduce to the American academic community a work that was not widely known in his country at that time. A few weeks later, on November 9, the French composer would die.

The Grand Tour was a journey through Europe, with Italy as the final destination, that many young men from wealthy families used to do to round off their training and see the world. However, Thomas Moore's trip to Italy was motivated by a different motivation: to avoid the prison of creditors. Twenty-five years earlier, he had been given a position of responsibility in Bermuda [...]

On this occasion, the poem is the one that begins with the words “Es war ein König in Thule”. Goethe wrote it in 1774 and “recovered” it in 1808 to include it in his Faust, this time a ballad sung by Gretchen. I told you about it a few years ago in some detail, when we listened to Der König in Thule, the song Franz Schubert made upon these verses; I will briefly tell you the story to give you [...]