What do the following musicians have in common?
Skalkottas, Beach, Rubbra, JC, WF and JF Bach? The answer, of course, is that they’ve all been Radio 3 Composers of the Week. Alongside Mozart (106 times), JS Bach (99 times), and Handel and Haydn (88 times each).
Ten years ago I wrote a piece for these very pages as we celebrated 70 years of CotW. Little did I think I’d be marking its 80th year and my own near quarter of a century presenting one of the longest-running programmes on radio.
When the programme started in 1943, under its original title of This Week’s Composer, the style was simple. Just a handful of records, only 30 minutes’ worth, introduced economically by whichever Radio 3 announcer happened to be on duty. In later decades guest experts were sometimes invited to introduce different weeks and the show could be relied upon to deliver authoritative perspectives on the composers featured, even if not all of the experts made very natural or engaging presenters. During my tenure, our focus has been on storytelling. I invite listeners to get to know our composers as human beings and to follow their struggles and triumphs, be those everyday challenges or tales of extraordinary achievement. I hope the audience comes away entertained, but also with a fresh connection to the music we play.
When I first joined the programme in 1999 I was certain that within a few weeks I’d feel a tap on the shoulder and someone would say ‘We’ve obviously made a terrible mistake. Would you please just go away?’ That feeling has never quite left me, but mostly I just feel a sense of tremendous privilege and delight – it’s always extraordinary to uncover the human stories that lie behind the music we love, and, also, to be introduced to new music.
Composer of the Week has evolved significantly even in the time I’ve been working on it, not least in the range of musicians we talk about. The number of female composers featured has enormously increased. Twenty-five years ago we might have focused on Ethel Smyth or Clara Schumann but they were very much the exception rather than the rule. In the last few months alone we’ve covered Hildegard of Bingen, Isabella Leonarda, Johanna Müller-Hermann, Barbara Strozzi, Doreen Carwithen and Mel Bonis, all, apart from Hildegard and Strozzi, making their first appearance on the show.
The spread of ethnicity has also expanded, and in the last year we’ve looked at Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Adolphus Hailstork and the composers of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s been wonderful to bring that variety of repertoire to the programme.
Jazz, too, now makes an occasional appearance. It’s not an area I know a huge amount about, so there have been some revelatory weeks for me, telling the stories of Billy Strayhorn, Carla Bley, Mary Lou Williams, Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans among others. There was a fascinating week on bebop a few years ago, and film composers also crop up regularly these days, including Elmer Bernstein, Rachel Portman and John Williams. And there’s been Broadway stars including Stephen Sondheim, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin.
I was reluctant to get involved with it at first but Twitter has proved to be a great way for listeners to let us know what they think. It’s interesting to see how people trust the brand of the programme, and even if they’re not great fans of the featured composer (or genre) they’ll stick with us and let us know they’ve been converted. Listeners also contact us with their suggestions of who to feature.
Last year, we told the story of Hélène de Montgeroult, a composer at the time of the French Revolution. I worried there wouldn’t be enough recorded music, or enough narrative, since the only biographical material was a slim volume in French. Luckily there are French speakers among the CotW team, and it turned out to be one of the best stories I’ve ever had to tell. Her music saved her from the guillotine. I mean, it doesn’t get much better than that!
As society’s values change, so do our perspectives. More than a few composers have challenging aspects to their stories – from Wagner’s antisemitism to Gesualdo’s vicious murder of his wife and her lover (for which he was never punished), and today we look anew at things such as Beethoven’s well-documented legal battles to assume parental responsibility for his nephew, Carl – and ask whether Carl’s bereaved mother was treated fairly by the courts and by Beethoven himself. It’s difficult – and often inappropriate – to apply today’s morals to historic figures, but we have to try to understand how stories that have come down to us have often been coloured by the biases and values of past biographers.
Not all composers have lives filled with great love affairs like Berlioz, duels (that was Handel), or been thrown in jail (Carl Maria von Weber); some of them just sat at home working hard, writing their music. Fortunately, there are always interesting stories to unearth about the times and places in which they lived.
Being in the presenter seat through 2020 was a particularly extraordinary time. That year was Beethoven’s 250th anniversary and all over the world fantastic festivals had been planned in celebration, and all had to be cancelled. But we were able to broadcast Beethoven Unleashed – 125 programmes over 25 weeks across the year. No one, in the history of radio, has had the privilege of examining Beethoven’s life in the way that I was able to. During that year of lockdowns I was on my own for long periods, but every other week I would come back to Beethoven and it proved a profound solace. The scale of the project was an incredible testimony to the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the team, but there was also a kind of spiritual dimension to it that I don’t think we’d quite anticipated.
And of course, a major pleasure of this job is spending time in conversation with contemporary composers or with their close associates or descendants. Sometimes guests are able to give us fascinating insights or fill in domestic detail. At a time when there was no published biography to give us that kind of information, Elizabeth Maconchy’s daughter, Nicola LeFanu (a composer herself), was able to tell us about the way her mother worked. Often composers are bemused at the very idea that we would give such a focus to their work. Interviewing John Adams back in 2012, there were several times during the course of the conversation when he just stopped and said, “This is so amazing. Thank God for the BBC – this would never happen in the States.”
On a personal level, I’ve had many pinch-me moments in the course of making the programme. One was visiting the Universal Studios lot in Hollywood to interview John Williams. We were directed to a small private enclave that belonged to Steven Spielberg and the whole place was done up like some kind of gold rush town, with hitching posts outside so that you could tie your horse up if you happened to arrive on horseback. Williams was charming and thoughtful, as well as slightly surprised that we should be making a programme about him in the first place. The little boy in me was just thinking, “Is this really happening?”
Perhaps one of the most memorable of these interviews was over tea and cakes with US composer Ned Rorem, who was 80 at this point. He told me he’d spent a lot of time that morning trying to make up his mind whether he would wear shorts or not. And then, he suddenly asked, “Would you like me to do a handstand for you?” No other living composer had ever asked me that, and of course I felt I had to oblige by saying yes. So he did, And he did it very elegantly.
John Adams was right. There is no other programme on the planet that gives this amount of space to a single composer, or that gives listeners the chance to immerse themselves in the whole range of a composer’s work.
• The programme’s 80th anniversary is celebrated in a series of special shows this week featuring highlights and behind-the-scenes stories from previous composer interviews. Composer of the week, presented by Donald Macleod and Kate Molleson is on Radio 3 12-1pm Monday to Friday and on BBC Sounds.
