A man is furious with his enemy. He doesn't say a word because he only talks to his friends. His anger grows, and he does nothing to avoid it, on the contrary: day by day, he nourishes it with his tears and his false smiles. Eventually, it bears fruit: an apple as appetizing as poisonous. Because hatred poisons whatever it touches. The man knows that his enemy will desire that apple. He won't wait long until he discovers, pleased, his corpse in the garden.

Songs often talk about love, sadness, hope, loneliness, peace, sometimes recount funny stories and more often, terrible dramas. We see ourselves reflected in these situations because we have experienced them, [...]

 

P is for poetry, because there is no song without poetry. For us, literally, prima le parole, poi la musica, a poem that inspires the composer is needed to have a Lied. So, poetry couldn't be left out of Liederabend's alphabet. But how do poets arrive at those poems? Reading, of course (thank you, Captain Obvious!). But do they read to find some poems that can be musicalized? Or maybe do they read for pleasure and then a poem asks them for music?

We know that Wolf was an incurable reader of poetry and marked in his book the poems that would become music. Schumann was also a passionate about reading (he even hesitated between being a writer or a composer) and he was organized enough to write down when and where he had found that poem he had composed.

 

When a song has been stuck on my mind for weeks, it's time to share it with you; It's proven that talking about it is a way of getting rid of it (just to make room for a new earworm anyway). In addition, this song isn't really well-known, and maybe some of you will hear it today for the first time. Do you remember that some time ago I talked about Geheimes and its daring elegance? Well, Des Fischers Liebesglück (The fisherman’s luck in love) is somehow similar; a refined, elegant Lied and, at the same time, subtly risky.

 

The year 2018 has just arrived so the first and most important thing is to wish you a wonderful year. The Lied seasons are putting together very interesting (a priori) song recitals, let's see what we say a posteriori! For instance, next Tuesday, the first song recital this year in Barcelona (as far as I know), is given by an experienced singer, Anne Sofie von Otter, with Christian Bezuidenhout at the fortepiano. And, as wrote down in my notebook, this year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of my beloved Leonard Bernstein.

But, as you know, our Christmas Season is not over on Liederabend yet, given that the Three Holy Kings are on their way to our homes, therefore, this is the third and last Christmas post of this season. We're listening to [...]

 

This week I'm (more or less) on holiday, so I'm posting a very brief Christmas post, the second one this season. Just a few words to talk you about a little, tender, song: one of the Trois chants de Noël by the Swiss composer Frank Martin, his first song here on Liederabend.