Among the musical anniversaries of this new 2025, there is one that the world of Lied will celebrate widely (and I hope we will not be the only ones): the centenary of the birth of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. A great baritone, of course, but above all, a personality without which the genre would not be understood in the second half of the 20th century. And I wanted to begin the year with his [...]

On Christmas days, we look at the children, their excitement, their laughter, their innocence, their eyes that look at everything... And, at some point, we remember with longing that time that the children were us. Don't we? This is the subject of the poem of this week, written by the Austrian poet Christiane Rosalia Frideriks, who used to sign her work as Ada Christen.

From Nazareth to Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary traveled approximately 120 km on foot. Perhaps, at times, Mary was on the back of the donkey that carried the necessary load for the trip (a donkey that Luke does not name, but which it is logical that they carried and is part of the collective imagination). Even so, it was a very hard journey for a woman who was about to give birth.

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 [...]