I like February. I like that light and sun that begin to warm us up, I like that feeling on my cold face (in the very few cold days we’ve got in Barcelona). I also like to see almond trees and mimosas in bloom; those cherry plums won't be long before also flourish. I like to see the buds on the branches, in a few days they'll blossom out and the austere beauty of the trees will be enhanced with tiny shoots. We should be attentive to be able to see it, otherwise, spring will burst out covering in green all over without us noticing. I live by the sea with a Mediterranean climate and most trees and bushes don't shed; that's why, I think, I love taking my time to observe fruit trees, linden, season passing by and be watchful, this time of the year, for those first shoots. And, also this time of the year, I think of a Schumann's Lied [...]

 

 

On 5th February 2012 I posted on this blog for the very first time; the post title was A blog about what? Now, two years later, Liederabend is still on the blogosphere; this week we are celebrating our birthday and I think this is a good time for some acknowledgements.

Thanks to:

 

Auditory memory is capricious: sometimes it’s surprisingly good and others, it’s a completely disaster. It works fantastically well, for instance, recalling a melody: we can hear it faster, slower, with different rhythms or different instruments and it’s still being recognized. It’s a disaster when... Well, that’s what the post is about.

 

Let’s perform an experiment. Do you remember how your school was? The corridors, the classrooms, the playgrounds, the teachers... Most probably not only can you describe how it was but also, with your eyes closed, you can "see" it, like when you see a photograph. Notice that there are two different kinds of memory: one thing is to store the data that allows us to describe the classroom and another one is to store an image [...]

 

1823 was not a very good year for Schubert. We know that he was seriously ill the first few weeks of that year (maybe even since the previous one) and was in hospital around the spring. We don't know exactly what his illness was. His friends kept silent about it but this silence as well some of the symptoms and comments about Schubert's morals (harsh and quite insensitive comments, I must say), lead us to believe that he suffered from a venereal disease, most probably syphilis.