A few days ago, when I was finishing last week's article on Red Roses and Red Noses, I read a detail about the song that I had missed until then. On the booklet of "My Garden" (the CD from which I extracted the interpretation I shared), Richard Stokes said that Lord Berners' song was clearly a parody of Thomas Moore's song The Last Rose of Summer. I thought first I'd make [...]

[...] Nancy Mitford knew the world she wrote about well. She was the daughter of Baron Redesdale, and in her novel Pursuit of Love there is no shortage of autobiographical traits or characters inspired by real people. For instance, Lord Merlin closely resembles a good friend of the writer, Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson (1883–1950), better known as Lord Berners after he [...]

After listening to Andrè Schuen and Daniel Heide's great performance of Die schöne Magelone, I thought it had been a long time since I'd shared a song from this Brahms cycle here. When I checked, I discovered that it was in January 2016, more than seven years ago! It's been a while. So, it's time to listen to one more song from this work, officially called Romanzen aus Ludwig [...]

As you might know, I always select a song with a religious subject for these days. Nine years ago, I shared one by Rachmaninoff, Christ has risen, composed in 1906. To set the song for this week, we have to go a few years forward, until a terrible moment in European history: autumn 1914, a few months after the outbreak of the First World War. The most informed Russian [...]

One of the main themes of the troubadour tradition is courtly love, a love that was elevating and spiritual. The beloved was a noble woman, and the troubadour had a lower rank; their relationship followed the terminology of feudalism: she was his lady, and he was her vassal. Moreover, the lady used to be married, which made her even more inaccessible. Courtly love was necessarily platonic because otherwise, the lady would [...]