Howard Goodall's Story of Music Episode Rating Graph

In the fourth part, composer Howard Goodall examines the music of the middle to late 19th century, in which a craze for operas and music that dealt with death and destiny swept Europe. Inspired by Berlioz and his Symphonie Fantastique, music written about witches, ghouls, trolls and hellish torment became the norm. Even Italian opera succumbed to the death and destiny obsession, with Verdi's La Traviata. The tragic death of its heroine was also a comment on the hypocrisies of the wider society. The composer who was the most influential figure of the mid 19th century was the cosmopolitan Hungarian-born Franz Liszt. Little wonder that he wrote pieces about two of the mythical figures that obsessed the composers of the period - Faust, the superior, brooding intellectual who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for esoteric knowledge and earthly pleasures, and Prometheus, who is punished for all eternity by Zeus for giving mankind the gift of fire.

In the fifth episode, composer Howard Goodall looks at the period when modernism in music arrived, and when the birth of recorded sound changed the way music was heard, played, and sold, forever. The death of Richard Wagner in 1883 led, not to a series of pseudo-Wagners, but to a series of developments that in many ways were in opposition to his monumental ambitions. In France the uncluttered and 'chillaxed' music of Gabriel Faure, Erik Satie and others was like a long hot lazy afternoon. The symphonies of Gustav Mahler invited all forms of music, including Jewish folk music into their generous embrace. Elsewhere folk music was beginning to make an impact on musical form and texture. The self-taught Mussorgsky actually sounded Russian - unlike Tchaikovsky, the most famous Russian composer of the day! When Mussorgsky's music came to the Paris World Fair in 1889 it astonished non-Russian composers, especially Claude Debussy.