Arts & Letters – Spirituality

Virginity and free love in the immigrant world of tenements, in Miriam Karpilove’s newly translated, unselfconsciously Jewish, and hugely popular Yiddish novel ‘Diary of a Lonely Girl’ One goal of this column has been to persuade you to read dusty old Jewish books that were edgy and cool a century ago. This means, I hope, that you are getting a powerful impression of the depth and inventiveness of Yiddish literary artistry. What...

Henry David Thoreau was one of the most influential transcendental American writers and Walden was one of the movement’s most important works. Solitude, except from Walden, is thus more a state of mind than an actual physical circumstance, and for Thoreau it approaches a mystical state. Thoreau is making a point to differentiate between solitude and loneliness, which one can feel even when one is in the company of other people. This is a...

Schubert’s masterpiece, a song cycle portraying the physical and spiritual journey of a poet who searches through the nature of the creation the soul of the art … Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, completed in 1827, is a set of 24 songs for voice and piano composed almost entirely using minor keys, which unlike the warm sounds of major keys often sound sad to our ears. Its mournful character reflects some of the personal trauma that Schubert himself was experiencing at the time. After years...

A dozen of the best Schubert Lieder to take the listener beyond the three great song cycles Turning poems into precious music: Franz Schubert (1797-1828), in a lithograph by Josef Kriehuber There is something lodged deep in the English spirit which resists the prospect of an evening spent listening to Schubert’s Lieder. Even for those who respond to the beauties of his music, the thought of all that “heavy German poetry”,...