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.