In the same notebook I wrote the last verse of Divine Comedy as a teenager, I wrote down these two verses; I also fell in love with them. I imagine we read them in our literature lesson, but I forgot about the context, a poem dedicated to Palma and written in Barcelona in September 1937. I remember how impressed I was by the poet's fate; I imagined him in the sanatorium, slowly ebbing away because of an incurable disease that I only knew through some of my readings. Without knowing any more, his name, Bartomeu Rosselló-Pòrcel, stuck in my mind and I’ve paid him some attention when I’ve come across his name now and then.

This name, Josef von Spaun, has appeared on this blog several times. Once, as the poet of a single Lied by Schubert, Der Jüngling und der Tod; always, as a friend of the composer. As I explained some other times, they met at the Stadtkonvikt. It was a boarding school where children from wealthy families were prepared for university, and also children on scholarships who sang at the Imperial Chapel's choir and who were allowed to stay even after their voice changed if their academic results were good enough. This way, as a choirboy, in October 1808 Franz Schubert joined a [...]

Schumann did something quite surprising when he composed Dichterliebe: he created his own poetic cycle from a larger work in order to compose his cycle of songs. No one had ever done that before. It's true that Schubert got rid of some Die schöne Múllerin's poems, and the order of Winterreise's songs didn't match that of the poems due to a misunderstanding, but Schumann went one step further. He, who in February 1840 had rigorously musicalized the nine poems from Heine's Lieder cycle (his Liederkreis, op. 24), in May, put together a selection of the sixty-six Lyrische Intermezzo poems for its new cycle. Somehow, Schumann followed those scriptwriters who [...]

Update 15/6. The article I wrote in February doesn't make sense anymore. I could have deleted it to write a new one with the new programme, but I preferred to update it by copying at the end the original text. Let’s not forget too soon that one day a virus arrived that upset everything.

More than one hundred composers. In particular, 104 composers and 439 songs altogether. I must admit that when I checked the numbers for this birthday post, that figure impressed me; I don't think I would be able to list one hundred composers of song if you would ask me now. However, there's another way of set out that: Most composers wrote some songs at some time or other in their careers, so I hope we keep on listening to new composers for a long time, even as unexpected as Bruckner, for instance.