Weimar 99
Broadcast over the weekend 28/29 August 1999
Presented by John Tusa and others
Produced by Martin Cotton
1 A Walk through Weimar
 John Tusa, now Director of the Barbican
Centre in London, and Professor Jim Reed of Oxford University
took us on a three-hour walk through Weimar, visiting its
most famous (and infamous) sites and monuments, including the
Herder Church, the Goethehaus, the Schillerhaus, the Anna Amalia
Library, the Schloss, the Park on the Ilm with Goethe’s
Garden House, the Liszt Museum, the Bauhaus Museum, the ducal
vault where Goethe and Schiller lie buried, and finally Buchenwald
concentration camp, built only a few miles from the city.
2 Faust
Martin Swales, Professor of German of UCL, tells the story
of the Faust legend, with excursions into the world of
music. He traces the story’s development from its medieval origins
through Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein to more recent incarnations in Adler & Ross’s
`Damn Yankees’ and Randy Newman’s album `Faust’.
With comments from Jim Reed, Alexandra Richie, Philippa Gregory
and Philip Hensher, readings by Jonathan Keeble and Siri O’Neal,
and Faust-related music by (among others) Boito, Berlioz, Busoni,
Koeber & Minach, Scanlon & Smith, Liszt, Eben, Beethoven,,
Gounod, Mussorgsky, Schumann, Randy Newman, Boulanger, Mahler,
Schubert and Dudley Moore.
 3 Celebrity Recital
Goethe – Life, Love and Music
John Tusa introduces a recital of Goethe song settings given
at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London early in 1999.
Thomas Allen (baritone)
Solveig Kringelborn (soprano)
Roger Vignoles (piano)
Part I
Beethoven: Mailied; Wonne der Wehmut; Neue Liebe, Neues
Leben
Schubert: Geheimes; Auf dem See; An Schwanger Kronos
Liszt: Uber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh; Freudvoll und Leidvoll;
Der Konig in Thule
Loewe: Erlkonig; Gutmann und Gutweib; Der Zauberlehring
(Interval feature) Goethe and Song
Richard Stokes discusses Goethe’s ambivalent attitude
to musical settings of his verse.
Part II
Settings by Schubert, Schumann and Wolf of songs from
`Wilhelm Meister’s years of Wandering’, with readings
by actor Sam West from Goethe’s novel in a translation
by Roger Vignoles.
4 The Magnetic Mountain
Liszt described Weimar
as a `magnetic mountain’, drawing
in musicians and composers from all over Europe. John Tusa
introduces music written by famous Weimar visitors and residents.
Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No.3 in G, BWV1048
Liszt: Prelude and Fugue for organ on the name BACH
Strauss: Suite in B flat for 13 wind instruments
Hindemith: Kleine Kammermusik for wind quintet (1922)
5 Sunday Feature: Weimar 99
John
Tusa talks to Dr Christopher Clark of the University of Cambridge
and to Weimar residents from different walks of life to explore
how the present-day city is finally laying its ghosts, and
how life in Germany has changed since re-unification.
 A Goethe Celebration: Fragments of a Great Confession
5
Postscripts celebrating the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s
greatest poet and writer.
1 A Man of his Time tx 23/8/99
Professor
Nicholas Boyle, author of the definitive Goethe biography,
sets Goethe’s career in the context of the
Germany in which he lived, beginning with his origins as
a promising young lawyer in his native city of Frankfurt,
before his move to the autocratic duchy of Weimar at the
age of 26.
2 Werther and the Suicide Cult Tx 24/8/99
Goethe described his
literary output – poems,
plays, novels, scientific writings – as `fragments of
a great confession’, and perhaps none was so directly
linked to events in his own life as his early novel `The Sorrows
of Young Werther’. This tale of adulterous love and
death was inspired by Goethe’s own unrequited passion
for a young married woman, and by the dramatic suicide of
an acquaintance. Historian Philippa Gregory explores the potent
influence of `Werther’ on a whole generation of young
European Romantics.
3 The Flight to Italy tx 25/8/99
In 1786 Goethe
left Weimar hurriedly and secretly for an extended visit
to Italy, a journey he had been wanting to take for over a
decade. He was away for 2 years and during that period kept
an extensive diary of his travels. Professor Jim Reed, editor
of the Italian diaries, comments on them, with readings by
Peter Eyre.
4 Elective Affinities tx 26/8/99
`Elective
Affinities’ – a scientific term describing
the attraction of opposites – is Goethe’s darkest
and most enigmatic novel, a story of marital infidelity and
betrayal suffused with the imagery of death. Author A.S. Byatt
and biographer Jenny Uglow discuss the novel’s influence
on later 19 th-century writing.
5 Echoes of the East tx 27/8/99
In the last of five programmes exploring aspects of Goethe’s
literary output, novelist Philip Hensher looks at the collection
of poems known as the `West-ostlischer Divan’ (West-East
Divan), inspired by Goethe’s discovery of the Orient
in the work of the Persian poet Hafiz.
|
