Heinrich Heine’s famous “Lyrisches Intermezzo” contains sixty-six songs and a prologue. In that prologue we meet a dreamy poet called a knight: Once upon a time there was a melancholy knight,With haggard, snow-white cheeks;He staggered and stumbled and lumbered around,Obsessed

Music played an important role in the life of Heinrich Heine. He did more than just write brilliant reviews of music and operas. For Heine, music was a great vital force that occupied an important place in the content sphere

We were visiting the Richmond Museum of Fine Arts the other week and noticed two wonderful pieces of particular musical interest. In the Museum’s extensive holdings of silver items, we found two pieces commemorating operas by Richard Wagner. A sterling

The very idea of making music inspired by the art form known as Abstract Expressionism seems an anathema. How do you pin down the undefinable? The music style that might match the art form of expressionism has come and gone

Composers know only too well the difficulty of maintaining the highest quality of craftsmanship and expression across genres. Beethoven wrote some real clunkers, as did Schumann and Rachmaninoff. Because Brahms very carefully controlled his output—we know that he mercilessly burned

William Jones first translated Hafez into English in 1771. It quickly fired the imagination of writers and poets such as Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who referred to him as “a poet’s poet.” Friedrich Engels, who together with Karl Marx

It has been said that every Iranian household contains two books, the Koran and Hafez. And a little saying suggests, “While one is read, the other is not.” More than 600 years after his death, the 14th-century poet Hafez of

In recent years, migration has meant the vast movement of peoples across West Asia and Europe and the Americas, seeking shelter from military action or economic inaction. At the turn of the 20th century, in America there was also a