For those of us who live near the Mediterranean, rosemary is a part of our culture, landscape, and gastronomy. We coexist with this simple shrub that is accustomed to drought, wind, and salt. Even when spring arrives and flowers, they do so discreetly, unlike other plants that have their glory moment with exuberant flowering. The rosemary's flower is tiny [...]

Goethe's Faust has not been as celebrated by composers as Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, by the same author. However, some of its songs have also been frequently set to music. The most famous are the sung by the female protagonist, Margaret; most notably, the one beginning with the verses "Meine Ruh' ist hin" (Gretchen am Spinnrade in Schubert's version), but also the [...]

Manuel de Falla premiered La vida breve in Paris, at the Opéra Comique, in January 1914. Shortly afterwards, an artist from the theatre approached him for advice: she wanted to perform some traditional Spanish songs at a concert she was due to perform in July at the Théâtre de l'Odéon. Could he suggest some pieces? At the time, the traditional song presented in concert was an [...]

I've been looking back over my notes about the Italienisches Liederbuch by Hugo Wolf these last few days because I'm preparing a talk about this work. And I realized that we had not listened to a song from this work for a long time, almost three years. I'm afraid that it's something that happens to me often, I forget the great works once introduced. It seems that 52 weeks a year are not so many... I can say in my defence that we usually listen to Wolf.

Wilhelm Killmayer was born in 1927 in Munich, and died in a nearby village, Stanberg, the day before his 90th birthday. He was born late enough to not have to fight in the war (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, for example, born just two years earlier, was not so lucky), but, of course, that disaster affected his life (he was the only one among his classmates who did not join any youth organization [...]