The Italian lyric and dramatic poet Giovanni Battista Guarini (1538-1612) is credited with establishing a new literary genre, “the pastoral drama.” According to scholars, he was the poet “whose verses were most frequently set by Italian madrigalists and monodists in

Friedrich Hebbel wrote his poem “Schön Hedwig” in 1838 as a protest reaction against “Griseldis,” a play in blank verse by Friedrich Halm that enjoyed huge success in Vienna. Halm’s play is set in Arthurian England, with the eponymous heroine

The art of the landscape painting has become rarer in modern art – with our closed urban environments, it’s more difficult to take that longer view, to survey the world, and find one’s position in a green space. New Zealand

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) devoted his formative years primarily to literature. Already at the age of 13, he had published articles, written large anthologies of poetry, a five-act tragedy, and translated many Latin works into German. He even tried his hands

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was known for his fluid style and his use of colour and it’s those two attributes that French composer Éric Montalbetti (b. 1968) chose as the inspiration for the three vocalises for voice and clarinet he created

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) suffered from various mental illnesses from an early age. Counselors and historian suggest that his diagnosis was dementia praecox, an illness soon renamed schizophrenia. Beginning in 1849, Schumann began to suffer from auditory hallucinations, and he heard

The ceramic art of writer and potter Edmund de Waal focuses on porcelain pieces, usually in a single colour, against a plain background. The installations carry their own rhythm and, when Scottish composer Martin Suckling looked at the works from

Robert Schumann had a face-to-face encounter with Friedrich Hebbel in 1847. Hebbel had called on Schumann in Dresden while passing through. Hebbel found Schumann “not only persistently, but also uncomfortably mute.” Schumann, as he noted in his diary, however, felt