After having written in a year and a half the fifty-three Mörike-Lieder, the thirteen Eichendorff-Lieder that completed his collection and almost all the Goethe-Lieder, Hugo Wolf was anxious. Which poet would be his next one? The answer came through a friend of a friend of his, who lent him a volume of poetry that seemed suitable. He was really right: just a week after writing the 51st and last song by Goethe, Die Spröde, on October 28, 1889 Wolf wrote Wer sein holdes Lieb', the first Lied of Spanisches Liederbuch (Spanish Songbook), a series of forty-four that he ended on April 27, 1890.

This week, I delayed the post until today because I wanted to talk about the Schubertíada, the 27th season has just been announced. Five of the concerts were announced in December and one more some days ago, and now, we know the whole season. We'll have great artists and great programmes!

The Schubertíada will be presented next Friday; we already know some of the concerts, but there is still many other to be discovered and I would like to explain every detail to you that very day; that's why today we have a new momento musical. While Friday arrives, I suggest that we listen to one of the songs we'll listen in Vilabertran, a kind of “music on hold”.

My dearest, at the end of this post we'll listen to a voice, as usual, but before that we're doing a new exercise: to observe a voice. Our aim is to draw some conclusion from our observation of vowels and consonants.

Let’s start by hearing a few seconds of spoken speech...

Friedrich Rochlitz was a lucky gentleman that didn't need to work to earn a living, so he worked a lot for pleasure, sharing his time between music and literature. With respect to music, he composed some works, he was the librettist of some others and in 1798 he founded in Leipzig the weekly Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. Regarding literature, his output was so extensive that when he decided to publish his best works, in 1822, he needed six volumes. His curriculum vitae was quite impressive, but today Rochlitz is mostly known as the author of the poems of two lieder by Schubert: Alinde and An die Laute [...]