logo
episode-header-image
Aug 2022
59m 52s

Mozart, The Music, The Myth, The Legend,...

JOSHUA WEILERSTEIN
About this episode

"I think Mozart just really loved people." - Jan Swafford.

For the Season 8 Finale, I had the great pleasure of welcoming back Jan Swafford, the great writer on music, who has written a spectacular new biography of Mozart. In this conversation, we talked about who Mozart really was as a person, some of the myths that defined him during his lifetime and into the present day, and of course, the incomparable music that Mozart was able to create, sometimes on a whim or in a single afternoon. This is a conversation about a man who understood people perhaps better than almost any composer, and a musician who scraped and struggled during his life while achieving immortality through his creations. Please note that this will be the last episode of Season 8 and Season 9 will begin on September 8!

Up next
May 1
Copland Clarinet Concerto
The commission for a new Clarinet Concerto from the great American composer Aaron Copland came from a rather unlikely source: Benny Goodman, the man known as the King of Swing. Goodman was one of the most famous and important jazz musicians of all time, but in the late 1940s, swi ... Show More
48m 13s
Apr 17
Steve Reich: Different Trains
Steve Reich, the great American contemporary composer, provided this program note about his work Different Trains: “The idea for the piece came from my childhood. When I was one year old my parents separated. My singer, song-writer mother moved to Los Angeles and my attorney fath ... Show More
52m 30s
Apr 3
Best of Frenemies: Debussy and Ravel
Debussy and Ravel are often described as the prototypical musical impressionists. It is often said that the two composers are the closest equivalents to the artistic world of Monet, Renoir, Pisarro, Degas, and others. But both Ravel and Debussy (like Monet for that matter), vehem ... Show More
52m 22s
Recommended Episodes
Dec 2023
Episode #192- Who Killed Mozart? (Part I)
There are few artists who are praised with the same level of hyperbole as Wolfgang Mozart. The German poet Franz Alexander von Kleist once said “Mozart's music is so beautiful as to entice angels down to earth.” The famous Russian composer Tchaikovsky declared that Mozart was no ... Show More
1h 20m
Jul 2012
Allegro in F -Mozart piano sonata 1 , 3rd movement
Our version of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Allegro in F -Mozart piano sonata 1 , 3rd movement Shiloh Worship Musicwww.shilohworshipmusic.com© 2012 Shiloh Worship Music COPY FREELY;This Recording is copyrighted to prevent misuse, however,permission is granted for non-commercial copy ... Show More
5m 43s
Jul 2012
Sonata 1 Mozart K300 1st movement
Our version of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Sonata 1  Mozart K300 1st movementblessings,Shiloh Worship Musicwww.shilohworshipmusic.com© 2012 Shiloh Worship Music COPY FREELY;This Recording is copyrighted to prevent misuse, however,permission is granted for non-commercial copying-Rad ... Show More
3m 18s
Apr 2016
Mozart's Requiem
How Mozart's Requiem, written when he was dying, has touched and changed people's lives. Crime writer Val McDermid recalls how this music helped her after the loss of her father. Hypnotist Athanasios Komianos recounts how the piece took him to the darker side of the spirit world. ... Show More
27m 36s
Dec 2023
Mozart's 'Requiem' premieres in Vienna
Synopsis Wolfgang Mozart died on Dec. 5, 1791, leaving behind an unfinished Requiem Mass, commissioned anonymously by Count Franz von Walsegg, a 28-year-old Austrian nobleman who had the ignoble habit of passing off works he commissioned as his own. The Requiem was intended to be ... Show More
2 m
Dec 2023
Mozart, Salieri and Beethoven in Vienna
Synopsis Oh, to have been in Vienna on today’s date in 1785! Wolfgang Mozart had just finished a new piano concerto a week earlier and quite likely performed it himself for the first time as an intermission feature at a performance of the oratorio Ester, by Karl Ditters von Ditte ... Show More
2 m
Mar 2024
Mozart
In this special live episode, with music by the BBC Concert Orchestra and pianist Ben Dawson, Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Hannah Templeton and comedian David O’Doherty in eighteenth-century Europe to learn all about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart is perhaps the most famous compo ... Show More
1h 11m