Last month’s article focused on the impact of the Great War on musicians, artists and writers in France –today I will focus on its impact in Germany and Austria.

2013 saw the celebrations of Verdi’s and Wagner’s bicentennials, the centennial of Benjamin Britten’s birth and of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’. 2014 marks a more somber centennial — of the outbreak of the Great War following the assassination of Archduke

Nobel Prize–winner and Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez died recently and we were looking traces of him in the musical world. His books and stories brought the realism and magic realism of South American literature to the world. He also

A recent concert by the distinguished Emerson String Quartet (Eugene Drucker, violin; Philip Setzer, violin; Lawrence Dutton, viola; Paul Watkins, cello) at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. paired Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 15 in E-flat minor, Op. 144

In Germany, in the early years of the 20th century, with rapid industrialization and growing urban populations, we see a return to, and a longing for, the simpler past of rural life, in opposition to the fast-paced life of the

In my last article, ‘Visions of Arcadia in Music, Art and Literature I’, I focused on the Arcadian theme in the classical period. Today I will concentrate on its continuation in the 19th century — with the music of Jacques

In my last article ‘Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Frederick the Great and the Architecture of the Rococo’ I focused on the re-emergence of pastoral themes in music and the arts. Members of the aristocracy, dressed as shepherdesses and shepherds appeared

“J’écris ce qui me chante” – “I write of that which sings to me”Francis Poulenc In 1916 in Paris, Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), a largely self-taught composer, was introduced by a close friend to Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop ‘La Maison des Amis