The 4th of September marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anton Bruckner, an event that went virtually unnoticed here in Catalonia. There were some concerts with his music and some magazines that wrote about him, but nothing else. I think it is a pity, because I would have said that a Bruckner Year would have been excellent for spreading his work.

Last week, we talked about the interpretation of dreams as a way of healing, and about the thirteenth song from Dichterliebe, Ich hab' im Traum geweinet. Let's remember that the poet dreams three times in this song, and all three times he weeps both during the dream and in awakening. In the last stanza he dreams that she is still fond of him, and that is when he weeps more [...]

Dream interpretation is an ancient practice; dreams often puzzle us, and all cultures have sought to give them a meaning. They have often been interpreted as messages from the gods: now that Christmas is coming, let's remember that God told Joseph in a dream that the family had to leave to avoid the madness of Herod. However, the messages are rarely so clear and so [...]

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 [...]