A few weeks ago I saw in Instagram some pictures of a new Lied festival in Germany. I realized that many Lied festivals had appeared during the last few years and I thought I could talk about them, to celebrate with readers that, as one of the most usual song-related hashtags says, #dasLiedlebt (the Lied is alive). You never know, maybe we will coincide with some of these events  in a city break. Or maybe we will check the programme and will organize that city break.

The season is about to end, and a few days ago I was going through my notebook to arrange my notes. And I found a note referring to the Schubertíada 2021. Perhaps you remember that in the first post in September I told you that the artists had been particularly opportune with the encores, and a few weeks later I talked about one of them, Abschied von der Erde. Well, I'll talk about another one today.

Franz Schubert wrote many part songs, but if I'm not wrong, he only wrote two duets for female and male voice. We heard one of them some years ago, as part of the series Wilhelm Meister's Songs; it's Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, a song that most composers consider as a Mignon's song, but in Goethe's novel it is actually a duet of Mignon and the arpist. The other one is, Licht und Liebe, which we're listening this week.

In mid-February 1877 Johannes Brahms received good news through friend and publisher Karl Simrock: the third (or fifth, according to different sources) child of Clara and Julius Stockhausen was born. A few days later, Julius himself wrote him to tell him that they have named the child Johannes, and to ask if he would be his godfather. Brahms accepted with pleasure; he loved children and had been good friends with Stockhausen since many years ago. He declined, however, to attend [...]

If we speak about Heine's Lieder, that is, about songs written after poems by Heine, the name of two composers comes immediately to mind: Schubert and Schumann. Schubert, who only left a small and magnificent sample of six Lieder after poems by Heine before his death, and Schumann, who twelve years later composed around forty songs, among them two cycles as important as Dichterliebe and Liederkreis, Op. 24.