Essay Three: Poodles

A new series of essays by the very popular Fiona Stafford, Professor of Literature at Somerville College, Oxford, following her much praised series of essays The Meaning of Trees and The Meaning of Flowers, Fiona explores famous composers and their devotion to certain dog breeds.

Through surprising and insightful stories and discoveries about both the composers and their dogs, the essays provide new insights into the type of people the composers were, their lives and the features of their chosen dog breeds that brought such devotion.

As an older man, Joseph Haydn was very comfortably off, living in the Esterhazy court in eastern Austria. An unlikely flirtation developed between him and a young woman who inadvertently offended him, when an incredible tale about her lover’s poodle prompted her to beg Haydn to set the tale to music. The story uncovers the depth of his loneliness and the fragility of his ego. Frédéric Chopin is famously reported as having been besotted with his lover, Georges Sand's toy poodle, who was the inspiration for his Minute Waltz due to its pirouetting. However, our research shows this not to be the case – not only was the white fluffy dog in question probably not a toy poodle, but the name of the waltz has much less to do with sixty seconds and far more to do with dog sizes. Poodles in the 1960s were seen as glamour dogs, the choice of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Walt Disney and surprisingly also Elvis Presley who gave them as gifts to women he courted. There's been a resurgence in recent decades for cross-breeding poodles as their coats are non-allergic for humans. Plus, poodle tales involving Beethoven, and Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Producer – Turan Ali ; A Bona Broadcasting production for BBC Radio 3 Show less