In 1933 Franz Werfel's epic novel "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh" was published to huge acclaim. Werfel was then at the height of his powers, an internationally known author. He told the story of Armenian villagers who, in 1915, resist deportation & annihilation by Turkish forces on the holy mountain of Musa Dagh led by an Armenian émigré who has returned to his ancestral home at this most fateful time. Set against the Ottoman Empire's attempts to deport or destroy its Armenian populations, in...
Jan 29, 2018•44 min
Alexander the Great's Tomb was famous and then it disappeared. Classical historian Edmund Richardson has spent the last few years following in the Macedonian's wake and admits to a growing obsession with the mystery of the missing corpse and its final resting place. Join him as he goes in search of those who claim to have found the conqueror's last remains, peers into a legend-filled sarcophagus standing shyly by the Rosetta stone in the British Museum and follows an imaginatively talented Engli...
Dec 03, 2017•44 min
Ian Sansom attempts to resurrect the spirit of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky
Nov 19, 2017•44 min
How do Russia's latest cultural émigrés feel about leaving their homeland? In Russia, culture is increasingly on the front line - many writers, theatre directors and academics feel stifled or under attack. Lucy Ash hears from those who have wrestled with the dilemma of whether to leave. For some, working abroad opens up space to think, while for others, the grief of obscurity can be all-encompassing. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, President Putin's most famous opponent, avoids speaking English and spends...
Nov 06, 2017•44 min
Dr Louisa Egbunike, lecturer in English at City University London, is interested in the shifting frame of Afrofuturism. The term was originally coined in 1993 to bracket together work by African-American writers, artists and musicians who were dealing with science-fiction and speculative themes. However it has only recently been suggested that work by creatives living in Africa and those who are part of the more recent African diaspora could also be described as Afrofuturist. Louisa talks to the...
Oct 29, 2017•44 min
Opera Historian Dr Alexandra Wilson dons her cloche hat and steps into the shoes of a flapper for a journey back to 1920s London. Jazz was the new fad imported for America, dance clubs were taking the city by storm and cinemas were popping up on every corner. But what was the place of opera in this new entertainment world? Based on new research, this feature will guide listeners around the heady operatic world of 1920s London to some of the venues where opera was thriving, including music halls,...
Oct 22, 2017•44 min
John Tusa revisits the provincial German towns where as a 19-year-old national serviceman he first discovered opera in 1955 and finds out why, 62 years on, it’s still thriving there. Back then, he was based in the centre of the country, at the garrison in Celle. None of his fellow officers seemed to think it at all unusual when John vanished off from time to time to spend an evening in nearby Hanover glorying, for example, in the Verdian climaxes of what was billed as “Die Macht des Schicksals”....
Oct 08, 2017•44 min
When Dana Gioia was appointed Poet Laureate of California in 2015 he was invited to read in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento. But Gioia believes the role is to encourage poetry throughout the state. He has a mission: to visit every county in the state of California. There are 58, stretching from Del Norte 1,000 miles south to Imperial, bordering Mexico; from the Sierra mountains and redwood forests to the desert; densely populated Los Angeles (almost 10 million) to almost empty Modoc (f...
Oct 01, 2017•44 min
Adam Smith traces Ernest Hemingway’s brutal, brilliant short story - from its birth in gangster-era Chicago, through its Hollywood afterlife as a noir classic, to its strange status as Ronald Reagan’s last movie. Ernest Hemingway wrote his short story ‘The Killers’ in 1926. Two hitmen enter a small-town lunch-room. They have come to kill an ex-boxer who has double-crossed someone. The boxer is warned, but doesn’t run. Hemingway captures the American man at a moral crossroads. Should he follow th...
Aug 13, 2017•44 min
The Edinburgh Festival was founded 70 years ago in the aftermath of World War Two. 1947 was a year of shortages and rationing, and the idea of starting an arts festival in Scotland's capital city must have seemed highly ambitious. Yet with the support of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Rudolf Bing, the general manager of Glydenbourne Festival Opera, undertook the challenge. It was to prove an international success that has lasted 70 years. With contributions from those who attended the first fest...
Aug 07, 2017•27 min
Forster's gay love story was a forbidden book, unpublished until his death.
Jul 09, 2017•43 min
James Rhodes is a massive Glenn Gould Geek: throughout his childhood he listened to Gould's recordings, had posters of him on his bedroom walls, and in the years since, those recordings have helped James through some of his darkest times. Gould is globally famous today not just for his astounding recordings as a pianist but also his many idiosyncrasies - humming throughout his performances, abandoning the concert stage in his early thirties, bundling himself up in winter coats and hats in the mi...
Jun 25, 2017•43 min
Catherine Fletcher explores Monterverdi's pioneering use of female roles and performers
May 14, 2017•44 min
Germany's celebrating 500 years since the Reformation - but what does it mean today? Chris Bowlby visits Wittenberg - where Martin Luther started it all in 1517. He discovers how the Reformation transformed life in many different ways, and helped make Germany a nation of singers and book-lovers. But amidst all the culture and kitsch Germany's also grappling with a darker legacy - Luther's anti-Semitism and exploitation by dictators and populists. Producer, Chris Bowlby Editor, Penny Murphy Part ...
May 08, 2017•43 min
The Rev Lucy Winkett goes on the trail of Martin Luther's musical reformation.
May 02, 2017•43 min
To mark Tony Harrison's 80th birthday, Paul Farley presents a profile.
Apr 24, 2017•44 min
Jon Gower visits the island of Skokholm off the coast of south west Wales, and uncovers the work of the pioneering naturalist RM Lockley, whose work inspired 'Watership Down'
Apr 18, 2017•44 min
Why did hundreds of jazz musicians turn to heroin in the post-war period?
Mar 27, 2017•44 min
How did opera become an art form consumed today by millions of people globally on computer screens, in cinemas and on the radio? And how, in particular, did New York's Metropolitan Opera become one of the most iconic and powerful producers of this Old World export? Flora Willson traces the roots of today's phenomenon of opera in cinemas to the years 1890-1930, when New York emerged as a global operatic centre. The programme shows how the Met took the initiative in those decades, exploiting new d...
Mar 12, 2017•44 min
Kevin Le Gendre presents a portrait of musician and spiritual leader, Alice Coltrane
Mar 05, 2017•43 min
The controversial French composer Boulez made three life-changing trips to South America.
Feb 06, 2017•44 min
In the Nazi camps and ghettos a vast range of music was created
Jan 22, 2017•47 min
Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough on how different cultures have viewed the end of the world
Jan 15, 2017•43 min
Christian Weikop, examines Kandinsky's Russian roots.
Jan 10, 2017•44 min
Listen in pop-out player Did Freud really dislike music as much as he professed? Stephen Johnson explores Sigmund Freud's enigmatic relationship with music. He talks to the American cultural analyst Michelle Duncan, pscyho-analysts and writers Darian Leader and Julie Jaffee Nagel, the music critic David Nice, whose first job it was to take tours around the Freud Museum in Hampstead, and the Barcelona-based neurologist Josep Marco Pallares who is studying amusia and music-specific anhedonia, whic...
Jan 06, 2017•44 min
David Attenborough recalls collecting music from around the world, and listens once again
Dec 25, 2016•44 min
Is the avant-garde dead? Paul Morley conducts an autopsy, but detects signs of life ...
Dec 11, 2016•44 min
Sandeep Parmar retraces the steps of "Paris", a lost Modernist masterpiece by poet Hope Mirlees, and Daniel Lee explores the fate of North Africa's Jewish communities during WW2.
Nov 17, 2016•44 min
1. Euphemism and Eroticism in Scottish Gaelic Songs. 2.Reappraising Nollekens.
Nov 13, 2016•44 min
What was the BBC's panel for new scores for broadcast?Charlotte Higgins finds out.
Oct 09, 2016•43 min
