Tag Archive: 0Poetry

Adelheid von Stolterfoth (1800–1875) was best known for her Rhenish poems; Goedeke called her ‘the true poet of the Rhine’. This is a copy of the first edition of The Rhenish Minstrel, published in Frankfurt by Carl Jugel in 1835, a version of her book Rheinischer Sagen-Kreis which Jugel had brought out the same year, […]

This is another post (one of a series) about pieces of music I have written. This week it’s the turn of The Little One, which I wrote back in 2009 for the Senior Choir of Dr Challoner’s High School, just up the road in Little Chalfont. It came about after the Choir of St John’s […]

I’ve blogged before about translating, and then setting, the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. As yesterday was International Translation Day, I thought this week I’d write about another piece of mine, At Cana. This was actually what first brought me to Rilke, when, in 2019, I was looking for a text to set for a […]

Printed in Jedburgh in 1821, these poems were written by a Andrew Scott (1757–1839), a Scottish a shepherd boy who enlisted at the outset of the American War of Independence and served for the duration of the campaign.  Of the many poems he penned there, most were lost, but ‘The Oak Tree’ survived and is […]

I’ve always been interested in English printing abroad, or foreign-language printing in the UK. Here’s a nice example of the latter, from 1769 (rare, too; I presume it must have been printed in limited numbers): The author, Carl Gottfried Woide (1725–1790), who hailed from Leszno (German Lissa) in Poland, served as preacher to both the […]

Years ago, in my final year as a undergraduate, I took a course on the medieval German epic. I was attracted by the idea of reading old German texts–Tristan and Isolde, Wolfram von Eschenbach‘s Parzival, the Nibelungenlied–although I soon wondered whether the choice was such a good idea when I realised quite how long they […]