Angela Gheorghiu – Lara – Granada

Spain’s triumphant Euro 2008 squad have arrived back home from Austria and are preparing to meet their euphoric fans.

Imre Kertész: The Pathseeker

The Pathseeker, a slender novel or thick novella by Nobel Prize-winning author Imre Kertész, is the account of a concentration camp survivor who returns to the place where he had been held only to find himself unable to bear witness to or find catharsis from the injustices he suffered as a prisoner. First published in [...]

Mozart Piano Concerto No. 9, First Mvt – Mitsuko Uchida

From: TheGreatPerformers

Mitsuko Uchida

Waiting for Godard

The film historian David Thomson once wrote that Jean-Luc Godard is “our first great director who does not seem to be a human being”. Thompson was grumbling about the lack of emotional realism in Godard’s films, but his remark could just as easily be generalized to apply to the man himself. Despite five decades of [...]

Touring With an Eccentric Guide – Heinrich Heine

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) once described himself as the last of the romantics and the first of the moderns, which may account for the winning combination of the playful and the serious in his writing. Today he is largely remembered for his ballad-like poetry, much of it set to music by Schubert, Wolf and other lieder [...]

Claudio Monteverdi – “L’Orfeo”

The Pound Error – The elusive master of allusion

Ezra Pound turns up five times in Peter Gay’s big survey of the modern movement in literature and the arts, “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy”—once in connection with T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (which Pound edited), once as the author of an anti-Semitic sentiment (one of many), and three times as the originator of [...]

Contest with nature – Women in Love

The two greatest novels written in English in the 20th century were published within a year of each other, DH Lawrence’s Women in Love in 1921, James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 – not coincidentally if one accepts that new centuries brew up an infection of creative fervency. “We are now in a period of crisis,” [...]

Literary perspectives: Austria

The German Book Prize (Deutscher Buchpreis) was first awarded in Frankfurt in July 2005. According to the German Publishers & Booksellers Association, it was intended to go to the “best novel in the German language” and so “to draw attention to German-speaking authors across national borders”. The initial selection of twenty titles was nevertheless called [...]

Renata Tebaldi – Schubert – Ave Maria