Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchHector Berlioz: The Obsessive Romantic Who Reinvented the Orchestra
Episode 6979
Hector Berlioz wrote the Symphonie fantastique — a symphony about a lovesick artist who hallucinates his own execution — because he was obsessively i…
1 week, 2 days ago
George Frideric Handel: The Sword-Fighting, Market-Crashing Composer Who Wrote Messiah in Twenty-Four Days
Episode 6978
George Frideric Handel fought a duel with a fellow composer, survived a sword thrust that was stopped by a coat button, went bankrupt running opera c…
1 week, 2 days ago
Gustav Mahler: The Tortured Conductor Who Built the Bridge From Romanticism to Modern Music
Episode 6977
Gustav Mahler said "my time will come" — and he was right, though he did not live to see it. During his lifetime, he was famous as the greatest orche…
1 week, 2 days ago
Greta Thunberg: From Lonely School Striker to the Most Polarizing Climate Activist on Earth
Episode 6976
Greta Thunberg was a fifteen-year-old with Asperger's who sat alone outside the Swedish parliament with a hand-painted sign reading "School Strike fo…
1 week, 2 days ago
George Gershwin: The Genius Who Bridged Jazz and Classical Music and Died of a Brain Tumor at Thirty-Eight
Episode 6974
George Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue, Porgy and Bess, and "Summertime" — bridging the gap between jazz and classical music more successfully than a…
1 week, 2 days ago
Franz Schubert: The Composer Who Died at Thirty-One With 1,500 Hidden Masterpieces
Episode 6972
Franz Schubert composed over 1,500 works — symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas, and over six hundred songs — and almost none of them were perf…
1 week, 2 days ago
Francisco Goya: The Court Painter Who Covered His Walls With Monsters
Episode 6975
Francisco Goya spent the first half of his career as Spain's most celebrated court painter — bright tapestry designs, flattering royal portraits, che…
1 week, 2 days ago
Kurt Vonnegut: From a Meat Locker in Dresden to Slaughterhouse-Five
Episode 6973
Kurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, sheltered in an underground meat locker while the city above him burned. He s…
1 week, 2 days ago
Caravaggio: The Murderer Who Painted the Most Divine Images in Western Art
Episode 6969
Caravaggio killed a man in a street brawl, fled Rome as a fugitive, and spent his final years running from a papal death warrant while producing pain…
1 week, 2 days ago
Albert Schweitzer: The Nobel Laureate Who Built a Hospital in a Chicken Hut
Episode 6967
Albert Schweitzer was a world-class organist, a groundbreaking theologian, and a philosopher who abandoned all of it to build a hospital in the equat…
1 week, 2 days ago