BBC - Story of Music Episode 4 torrent

In the fourth programme of Howard Goodall’s Story of Music, composer and presenter Howard Goodall shares his view of the music of the middle to late 19th century. During this period he charts the European craze for operas and music that dealt with death and destiny.

Howard suggests that composers were inspired by Berlioz and his Symphonie Fantastique and that music written about witches, ghouls, trolls and hellish torment became the norm. Italian opera succumbed to the death and destiny obsession with Verdi’s La Traviata, whose tragic death of its heroine, he argues, was a comment on the hypocrisies of the wider society. Howard also notes how the age of the great composer emerged, and argues that the image of the composer as a ‘misunderstood genius’ was cemented in the public imagination.