Documentaries

Factual: History

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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: A Robert Schumann Album

The Essay: A Robert Schumann Album: Episode 2: Passionate Reader, Pioneering Critic

A Robert Schumann Album

Episode 2

Episode 2: Passionate Reader, Pioneering Critic

Passionate Reader, Pioneering Critic

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Eric Jensen charts Schumann's progress from all-devouring reader to music critic.

Biographer Eric Jensen shows how important Schumann's pioneering musical criticism and journalism was to him and his successors.

Schumann's family wanted him to become a lawyer. Schumann opposed them but he loved books, and wondered whether he might become a writer. At the age of 20 he made up his mind to be a musician, but his commitment to writing never left him. He co-founded the most influential music magazine of the time, the Neue Zeitschift Fur Musik, and became its owner and editor. In fact it paid him more than his compositions for the first 10 years of composing. His biographer Eric Jensen shows how his appraisal of his fellow composers paved the way for writing about music in a new and informed style, as well as painting a picture of musical developments in the mid-19th century. When his compositions began to find success he resigned from the magazine, but towards the end of his life he collected his best work to form a book of musical criticism, including his last piece about an unknown composer called Johannes Brahms. Schumann described him briefly and generously as ' a genius'.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Series revealing different aspects of Robert Schumann's life and work

Series revealing different aspects of Robert Schumann's life and work, including his marriage, writing, children and his mental illness

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The Essay

A Robert Schumann Album

Episode 2: Passionate Reader, Pioneering Critic

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