Words and Music

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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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A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

A weekly journey of discovery, weaving together a range of music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

Words and Music: George Eliot's World

George Eliot's World

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Novels, letters and journals read by Fiona Shaw, Ellie Kendrick and Philip Bretherton.

George Eliot was a lifelong piano player and many of her novels and letters allude to it. The music includes works by Liszt, Handel, Clara Schumann and Tchaikovsky.

From meeting Clara Schumann to the piano playing doctor's wife in Middlemarch - Fiona Shaw, Ellie Kendrick and Philip Bretherton read from the novels, letters and journals of George Eliot, as well as responses to her and her work from the likes of Henry James and Virginia Woolf. The music is what she might have chosen to listen to including pieces by Clara Schumann, Bach, Liszt, Haydn, Handel and Purcell.

George Eliot played the piano all her life, was passionate about music and alludes to it many times in her novels and diaries. In her journal she talked of ‘music that stirs all one’s devout emotions blends everything into harmony – makes one feel part of one whole, which one loves all alike, losing the sense of a separate self’.
She knew and was friends many composers including Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt and Anton Rubenstein. In 1854 Eliot was travelling across Europe and met a famous pianist and composer in Weimar. It was Clara Schumann, described by Eliot as ‘an interesting, melancholic creature’. In Eliot’s novel, Daniel Deronda, she quotes from Rossini’s Otello, where he set to music Dante’s words:
Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella misseria
There is no greater sorrow than to recall happiness in the midst of misery.

On the Free Thinking website Fiona Shaw shares her insights into George Eliot's Mill on the Floss with a panel chaired by Shahidha Bari https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000bf70 

Producer: Fiona McLean

Readings:
Daniel Deronda
Woman in France 
Silas Marner
Middlemarch 
Simone de Beauvoir - Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
The Mill on the Floss 
Letter to Maria Congreve
Mr Gilfil's Love Story
Henry James - Letter to his father
Lady Ritchie - on George Eliot
W.L. Courtney - on George Eliot
George Eliot - from her Journal
George Eliot - from Self and Life
Edmund Gosse - on seeing George Eliot
Daniel Deronda
George Eliot- on Finishing Middlemarch
Middlemarch
Virginia Woolf George Eliot

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.

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