"Love, that moves the sun and the other stars."
I read this sentence somewhere when I was at school and I jotted it down in my notebook (yes, back then I already wrote in notebooks). Later, I found out that it was the last verse of Dante's Divine Comedy and it spoke about transcendent love. Still, damage was already done and the quote was engraved in that teenager's memory without further reflection, only for its beauty. Love moves the sun and the other stars and moves also poets to write verses (sometimes) so unforgettable as those of Dante; many of these poems became songs so it was just very easy to choose that word, love, to start a new series of songs.

 

When you’ve seen this title with five figures, you’ve probably guessed we’re celebrating our anniversary, right? Yes, this blog just turned four years! I'm really happy, four years on the network is a long time. Thank you all, my dear readers! Thanks for reading and commenting, either here, by mail, on the social networking or just having a beer. Today we’ll review the year and some figures, also we will discuss some new features on this webpage, I'll talk about a new series and we'll listen to a pearl.

 

Before I started writing this post, I thought back over the lullabies we’ve already heard; I remember those of Brahms, Strauss, Schubert, Barber, Britten and Duparc. The first ones are as expected, a mother (a father in Schubert's song) rocks her child to sleep; Britten and Duparc's songs are adult songs, where a man watches over a sleeping woman; the cradle song we're listening today is also an adult one, Ruhe, Süßliebchen (Rest, my loved), the 9th song from Brahm's cycle Die schöne Magelone.

 

One day, during an interval, a friend mentioned that she didn't like some funny songs we had just listened, arguing that sense of humor doesn't suit Art Song. Before I was able to answer, another friend said: "Of course it does! Art Song speaks of life and cries but also laughs, as life does!" I would have answered something similar: Art Song, or Poetry, where Art Song stars, reflects life. If you're not all sure about that, let me tell you a story before I talk about this week’s song.

 

After our last post, where we talked about the fair saint, we meet Wilhelm again, who arrives at Lothario's castle to hand out the letter that Aurelie wrote for him in her deathbed. We're starting the seventh book and will advance towards the second chapter of the eighth book to find the next song, So laßt mich scheinen, bis ich werde. There are eleven chapters and so many things happen that it's impossible to explain you all of them, even as superficially as I usually do, so I'm choosing just the most essential points relevant to the main plot.