Monthly Archive: September, 2013

Berthold Goldschmidt and Mahler’s 10th

I’m sure many readers here also follow Norman Lebrecht – if not, he offers on his daily news-digest a fascinating audio clip that should not get lost. It is Deryck Cooke explaining his… Continue reading

Franz Waxman

Those living in the UK may have listened to the BBC’s week-long broadcast on Radio 3 of film composers. I have to admit that I only caught a couple of the programmes. To… Continue reading

The Independent reviews Forbidden Music

It’s always a relief when people write positively about ‘Forbidden Music’. It’s still early days I’m told, and it can take up to two years for reviews to filter through. Slowly, they have… Continue reading

Anti-Semitic cartoons

In a perverse way, there is possibly no better means of trying to get our 21st century heads around anti-Semitism than looking through a collection of anti-Semitic postcards. This was quite a popular… Continue reading

Korngold’s “die Kathrin”

One of Korngold’s more puzzling confections is his opera ‘die Kathrin’. If one looks at the timeline of its composition, it comes exactly ten years after his previous opera ‘Das Wunder der Heliane’… Continue reading

The fall of the operetta

Edmund Eysler and Leo Fall are two operetta composers who along with Oscar Straus and Leo Ascher seemed to have vanished entirely from the repertoire. Whether this is the nature of operetta, which… Continue reading

The Zeitoper

Viktor Zuckerkandl makes a return to this page with his critique of the ‘Zeitoper’, a concept that has no English equivalent but was used to convey a genre of opera that offered the… Continue reading