Start the Week

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BBC Radio 4 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced BBC Home Service.

BBC Radio 4

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday

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Start the Week: Artistic influence: Beethoven, Rembrandt and MeToo

Artistic influence: Beethoven, Rembrandt and MeToo

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, Artistic influence: Beethoven, Rembrandt and MeToo

Andrew Marr with Sir Antonio Pappano, Dame Mary Beard and An Van Camp.

Andrew Marr with conductor Sir Antonio Pappano, historian Dame Mary Beard and art curator An Van Camp.

This year is Beethoven's 250th anniversary, and Sir Antonio Pappano is marking the occasion with a new production of Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio. He tells Andrew Marr how this work combined the composer's keen interest in politics with his bold new symphonic style. But Beethoven was never happy with the finished opera, and redrafted it many times. Pappano also tells Andrew about the enormous - and inescapable - influence Beethoven had on later generations.

Rembrandt was another artist who had an enormous influence on later generations. But a new exhibition at the Ashmolean in Oxford, curated by An Van Camp, shows the Dutch artist also redrafting and learning his craft. Young Rembrandt assembles drawings and paintings showing Rembrandt's astonishing rise, from unknown teenager to celebrity artist within a decade.

Dame Mary Beard looks at a more pervasive artistic influence in her new BBC Two series, The Shock of the Nude. Beard shows how artists from the classical era to the present day have decided what we think a body should look like and how we should respond to naked flesh. She explores what happens when the artistic traditions of the past confront the Me Too scandals and gender fluidity of the present.

Producer: Hannah Sander

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Artistic influence: Beethoven, Rembrandt and MeToo

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