The Essay

The Cairo Genizah is a treasure trove of manuscripts from the Ben Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo that portrays over 800 years of community life. Rediscovered in the 19th century, this vast communal paper-bin contained hundreds upon thousands of scraps of rag-paper and parchment. It's an unedited archive of prayers, letters, poems, magical spells, alchemical recipes, children's exercise books, divorce...

Five Essays about the 19th-century German composer Johannes Brahms. Part 5 of 5. Recorded in front of an audience at St. Georges, Bristol, as part of BBC Radio 3's Brahms Experience - a week-long exploration of Brahms' life and music. Brahms lived in a time of tremendous change. The idea of the 'future' was never far from peoples' minds: new technology was emerging, the political map of Europe red...

Five Essays about the 19th-century German composer Johannes Brahms. Part 4 of 5. Recorded in front of an audience at St. Georges, Bristol, as part of BBC Radio 3's Brahms Experience - a week-long exploration of Brahms' life and music. Brahms and and Freud co-existed in Vienna, as psychoanalysis was being born. But they belong to two vastly different epochs: what can we learn by setting them side b...

Five Essays about the 19th-century German composer Johannes Brahms. Part 3 of 5. Recorded in front of an audience at St. Georges, Bristol, as part of BBC Radio 3's Brahms Experience - a week-long exploration of Brahms' life and music. Brahms lived in a time of great political change. In his late thirties he saw the birth of a unified German nation under the 'Iron Chancellor' Otto von Bismarck. The...

Five Essays about the 19th-century German composer Johannes Brahms. Part 2 of 5. Recorded in front of an audience at St. Georges, Bristol, as part of BBC Radio 3's Brahms Experience - a week-long exploration of Brahms' life and music. Interaction with nature is one of the cornerstones of 19th-century Romantic music. Writer Lesley Chamberlain offers a chance to join Brahms for a creative ramble and...

Five Essays about the 19th-century German composer Johannes Brahms. Part 1 of 5. Recorded in front of an audience at St. Georges, Bristol, as part of BBC Radio 3's Brahms Experience - a week-long exploration of Brahms' life and music. To this day Brahms has a reputation as a rather terse, fearsome personality who wrote dark, serious music. But his tender, intimate chamber music gives a clue to how...

Stephen Johnson considers how five seminal pieces of music would have been appreciated by the audiences who heard them first. He probes the societies and cultures that shaped the experience of those original listeners to reveal what our modern ears might be missing. It's easy for us to recognise, in Stravinsky's first ballet score, portents of the musical revolution that would soon follow. This is...

Stephen Johnson considers how five seminal pieces of music would have been appreciated by the audiences who heard them first. He probes the societies and cultures that shaped the experience of those original listeners to reveal what our modern ears might be missing. Since its revival in the 19th century, Bach's St. Matthew Passion has been hailed as one of the pillars of Western music; universally...

Stephen Johnson considers how five seminal pieces of music would have been appreciated by the audiences who heard them first. He probes the societies and cultures that shaped the experience of those original listeners to reveal what our modern ears might be missing. The delightful charm of Schumann's Scenes from Childhood masks a surprising sophistication which marks them among his most popular pi...

Stephen Johnson considers how five seminal pieces of music would have been appreciated by the audiences who heard them first. He probes the societies and cultures that shaped the experience of those original listeners to reveal what our modern ears might be missing. The Lamentations by Victoria offer modern listeners a window into a Golden Age of sacred harmony, a period when the ethereal harmonie...

Stephen Johnson considers how five seminal pieces of music would have been appreciated by the audiences who heard them first. He probes the societies and cultures that shaped the experience of those original listeners to reveal what our modern ears might be missing. Haydn's famous Symphony No.100, his "Military Symphony", stands as model of classical elegance. Its famous bugle and percussion effec...

Five essays about one of the twentieth century's most fascinating playwrights, Samuel Beckett, recorded in front of an audience at the 2014 Happy Days International Beckett Festival in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. Authors include actor Lisa Dwan, now regularly performing his work; Mark Nixon, head of the Beckett International Foundation and journalist and commentator Fintan O'Toole. In this edit...

Five essays about one of the twentieth century's most fascinating playwrights, Samuel Beckett, recorded in front of an audience at the 2014 Happy Days International Beckett Festival in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. The authors include John Minihan, the photographer who captured some of the best known images of Beckett, actor Lisa Dwan, now regularly performing his work, and journalist and comment...

Five essays about one of the twentieth century's most fascinating playwrights, Samuel Beckett, recorded in front of an audience at the 2014 Happy Days International Beckett Festival in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. The authors include John Minihan, the photographer who captured some of the best known images of Beckett, actor Lisa Dwan, now regularly performing his work, and journalist and comment...

Five essays about one of the twentieth century's most fascinating playwrights, Samuel Beckett, recorded in front of an audience at the 2014 Happy Days International Beckett Festival in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. The authors include John Minihan, the photographer who captured some of the best known images of Beckett, actor Lisa Dwan, now regularly performing his work, and Mark Nixon, head of th...

Five essays about one of the twentieth century's most fascinating playwrights, Samuel Beckett, recorded in front of an audience at the 2014 Happy Days International Beckett Festival in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. The authors include John Minihan, the photographer who captured some of the best known images of Beckett, the writer Fintan O'Toole and Mark Nixon, head of the Beckett International Fo...

"Slate is our stone, from the quarries of Snowdonia", writes the Welsh poet Gillian Clarke in her Cornerstones essay, "just as the coal in the grate is ours, from the south Wales coalfield. We tread on slate every day." For her slate was inescapabable, ubiquitous: "In city, town, village and upland farm, we sleep under Welsh slate. Rain sings on it. It roofed every house I have ever lived in." Gil...

For 25 years the sculptor Peter Randall-Page has worked Dartmoor's obdurate and unforgiving granite boulders. He reflects on what it's like trying to wrestle with it: "granite is stuff personified, quintessentially dumb matter, it is what the earth is made of, congealed magma, planetary and galactic, inert and unintelligible." Peter's is the third of four essays in which writers and artists reflec...

The walker, writer and geologist Ronald Turnbull reflects on how some of his favourite landscapes across the UK are softly shaped by sandstone. The ease of carving it, he says, accounts for its attractions to mankind across time. This is the second of four essays in which writers reflect on the way their bedrock geology has shaped their favourite landscapes. The sandstone that characterises his ho...

Sue Clifford, co-founder of the arts and environment organisation Common Ground, reflects on what England's limestone landscapes mean to her, the way water has carved out vast underground cave systems. This is the first of four essays in which writers reflect on the way their bedrock geology has shaped their favourite landscapes. Limestone, as Sue Clifford says, is not only the stone of choice for...

Continuing the Sound of Cinema season, the Rev Richard Coles ponders heaven and hell in the classic 1946 Powell and Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death, starring David Niven. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, together known as The Archers, were one of the most influential and audacious film-makers of the 1930s and 40s. Their groundbreaking works include: 'The Red Shoes', 'The Life and...

Continuing the Sound of Cinema season, ballerina, writer and broadcaster Deborah Bull gives a dancer's take on Powell and Pressburger's best-known film, the 1948 classic 'The Red Shoes', starring Moira Shearer, and based on the classic Hans Christian Andersen fairytale. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, together known as The Archers, were one of the most influential and audacious film-makers...

Taking Robert Graves' phrase Goodbye to All That as their starting point, five writers from countries involved in the First World War reflect on a turning point moment in their own histories and interpret the phrase with the ambiguity that Graves intended. These five essays that have been curated by writer Lavinia Greenlaw to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, as part of 14-18 No...

Taking Robert Graves' phrase Goodbye to All That as their starting point, five writers from countries involved in the First World War reflect on a turning point moment in their own histories and interpret the phrase with the ambiguity that Graves intended. These five essays that have been curated by writer Lavinia Greenlaw to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, as part of 14-18 No...

Taking Robert Graves' phrase Goodbye to All That as their starting point, five writers from countries involved in the First World War reflect on a turning point moment in their own histories and interpret the phrase with the ambiguity that Graves intended. These five essays that have been curated by writer Lavinia Greenlaw to mark the centenary of the outbreak of World War One, as part of 14-18 No...