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On 31th August 1888, Hugo Wolf had just come back to Vienna from Bayreuth and was staying at his friend Friedrich Eckstein's place, a house in a busy neighborhood. The composer was walking along the garden trying to read some poetry by Joseph von Eichendorff but noise from a nearby factory disturbed him, and someone whistled and a carpet was rhythmically being shaken. How on earth could he concentrate on reading! Suddenly, however, he got into the house, sat at the piano and composed Verschwiegene Liebe in one go. That's how Ernst Decsay explains it in his composer’s biography, the first one to be published; maybe he embellishes a bit the story but truth is that Wolf borrowed his friend his house near Lake Attersee, much quieter, and between 21st and 29th September, he wrote ten lieder on Eichendorff's poems since he used to compose very fast when [...]- Details
We're arriving at the last three posts in the series about Wilhelm Meister's songs, all being well, the series will be finished before this season ends. In our previous post of the series, I talked about Mignon's death and funeral (Chapters 3 to 8 in the VIII book). During the ceremony, and thus we ended it, the Marquis, a gentleman who happens to be in the castle on business trip, notices a tattoo on Mignon's arm and identifies her as his missing niece. We get now into Chapter 9, the penultimate one in the novel, where the abbot reads to the group the story that the Marquis told him. I've already metioned that Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is full of soap opera plot twists, haven't I? Well, just keep reading...- Details
We welcome again our dear readers from the blog La brújula del canto. A month ago we launched a collaboration with its author, Isabel Villagar, a mini-series of posts about world-famous Lieder. So famous that we might not know they're Lieder. In our first post, we listened to Brahms’ best known work, his lullaby, and now we're listening to Hadydn’s best known work, this one:
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A was for amor, it couldn't be otherwise, how many songs on Liederabend don't speak of love? B was, naturally, for baritone (and baritonophilia. C is for contemporary as an answer to a common question: Do people still write Art Songs? And my answer is: sure they do! Not as frequently as in the nineteenth century, of course, but people still write songs. Today, we're listening to a beautiful one, a love song sung by a baritone. Some things never change.
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It was difficult to find the poems and also, some information about Bloch and his cycle; I’d say that suggests that the composer was quickly forgotten. Ernest Bloch was born in Geneva in 1880. He began to learn music as a child and lived in some European cities, first as a music student and after, trying to make his way as a musician, until he moved to the United States with his own family (he got married in 1904) in 1916. There, he achieved the success he hadn't had in Europe, so he decided to stay and was nationalized in 1926. Nevertheless, he missed Switzerland. He went back to his homeland and stayed there for about ten years. In 1938, driven by anti-Semitism and winds of war, he finally returned to America, where he died in 1959. Bloch left a rather extensive work (symphonic music, concerts, chamber music, choral works...) that I don't know at all; [...]
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