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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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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Wagner and His World

Composer of the Week: Wagner and His World: Episode 3: Wagner, Meyerbeer and Palestrina

Wagner, Meyerbeer and Palestrina

Episode 3

Episode 3: Wagner, Meyerbeer and Palestrina

Wagner and His World

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Wagner and His World, Wagner, Meyerbeer and Palestrina

Donald Macleod explores how Wagner first cherished, then rejected, Meyerbeer's influence.

Donald Macleod explores how Wagner first cherished, then rejected, Meyerbeer's influence - and investigates Wagner's little-known love of Palestrina.

Today's episode finds Wagner struggling to make ends meet as a young man in Paris but falling under the spell of French Grand Opera, in particular, the influence of Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wagner would later violently reject Meyerbeer's work in his hate-filled, anti-Semitic tract "Jewishness in Music". Yet back in the late 1830s, he had fallen in love with the vast theatrical sweep of Meyerbeer's work, channelling it into his own opera Rienzi.

We'll hear how Meyerbeer's big hits of the time, "Robert Le Diable" and "Les Huguenots", cast a shadow on Rienzi. Finally, as an antidote to all the melodrama of Grand Opera, Donald Macleod introduces a surprising influence on Wagner's work: the music of Palestrina, whom Wagner programmed and conducted in the 1840s, and whose Stabat Mater strongly influenced the shimmering textures of Lohengrin.

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.

Donald Macleod explores Wagner's important musical connections and relationships

Donald Macleod explores the connections and relationships that helped establish Wagner as the most revolutionary musical thinker of the 19th century

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Episode 3: Wagner, Meyerbeer and Palestrina

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