Reading American literature during my student days in Europe was a rather thankless and boring task. I simply had no connection to the naïve optimism of the American frontier mentality or the preachy virtues of the Puritan legacy. For me,

In 1894, the French writer and poet Stéphane Mallarmé gave a lecture in Oxford and Cambridge, England, about the relationship between music and literature, in which he alluded to the origin of the artistic creation — the ‘trace’ — whether

A recent concert by the magnificent Emerson Quartet featured Alban Berg’s ‘Lyric Suite for String Quartet’ (1925). An annotated copy of Berg’s composition which he had given to his mistress, Hanna Fuchs-Robettin was discovered by the Berg scholar George Perle

After finally achieving success with his opera ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ in 1902, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) wrote ‘L’Isle Joyeuse’ (‘The Joyous Island’), while working hard on his new composition, ‘La Mer’. His very successful artistic achievements were in stark opposition to

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