The Schubertíada will be presented next Friday; we already know some of the concerts, but there is still many other to be discovered and I would like to explain every detail to you that very day; that's why today we have a new momento musical. While Friday arrives, I suggest that we listen to one of the songs we'll listen in Vilabertran, a kind of “music on hold”.

My dearest, at the end of this post we'll listen to a voice, as usual, but before that we're doing a new exercise: to observe a voice. Our aim is to draw some conclusion from our observation of vowels and consonants.

Let’s start by hearing a few seconds of spoken speech...

Friedrich Rochlitz was a lucky gentleman that didn't need to work to earn a living, so he worked a lot for pleasure, sharing his time between music and literature. With respect to music, he composed some works, he was the librettist of some others and in 1798 he founded in Leipzig the weekly Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. Regarding literature, his output was so extensive that when he decided to publish his best works, in 1822, he needed six volumes. His curriculum vitae was quite impressive, but today Rochlitz is mostly known as the author of the poems of two lieder by Schubert: Alinde and An die Laute [...]

Long ago in a distant land, a 15-year-old girl lived happily, protected by her parents in the middle of nature. It happened that the emperor met her, and the next day he asked for her hand; a few months later they got married. If this were an old tale, the end would be “and they lived happily ever after”, but in fact, that's just the beginning of the story.