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: Keats

Keats

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Keats

The Romantic poet's writings on beauty, the seasons, his own health woven with music.

From his ideas about beauty and truth to the season of 'mists and mellow fruitfulness' and his letters to Fanny Brawne, with music echoing themes in Keats's poetry.

Nicholas Shaw reads from poems and letters written by John Keats.  Born in London in 1795, he trained as a doctor at Guy’s Hospital before devoting his life to his poetry. He wrote his famous odes, sonnets, epic poetry and romances along with around three hundred letters to friends and family including his great love, Fanny Brawne. In 1820, like his younger brother and his mother, he fell ill with tuberculosis. He sailed to Italy in the hope of recovery but died in Rome in February 1821. Much of the writing on Keats, particularly in the early biographies, focused on his early death and that of his mother and brother, seeing him as a victim. But it’s also possible to feel astonishment at the life he led and the work he left us, both in his poetry and the many hundreds of letters to friends and family where he wrote about his great excitement at the travels he took around Britain and his thoughts on poetry. 
 
Some of Keats’ earliest memories were from his early life in boarding school where he read his way through the school library and then lay at night listening to his headmaster playing Mozart, Handel and Arne on the piano. Mozart’s Divertimento in D Major is heard along with Thomas Arne’s Overture no 2 and the Air ‘Water parted from the sea’ from Arne’s Artaxerxes, a piece quoted by Keats as he sailed in violent storms to Italy in the hope that life there would help him recover from his tuberculosis.

There is also work by composers inspired by Keats’ verse - The Smiths’ Cemetery Gates, Benjamin Britten’s Serenade op 31 and Dorothy Howell’s Lamia. And Death and the Maiden by Schubert who lived in Keats’ time and, in some ways, a similar and tragic life. The academic Christopher Ricks compared the work of Keats to that of Bob Dylan’s, arguing that both of them knew that ‘the calling of a real artist is to keep truth and beauty moving onward; not a-standing still like a statue’. You’ll hear Dylan’s Love Minus Zero where he sings of love being a fundamental truth in life. In Rome, Keats’s friend Joseph Severn hired a piano and played the piano arrangements for Haydn’s symphonies for him in his final days, here played by Ivan Ilic.

Words and Music ends with Keats’s final letter to Fanny Brawne in which he fears that his illness has become a barrier between them and his great poem Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art, with Jacqueline du Pre playing the Adagio from J.S. Bach’s Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C.

Producer: Fiona McLean

You can find more information about Keats https://keatsfoundation.com/ 
An episode of Free Thinking called eco-criticism explores contemporary takes on poetry about nature including works by Keats and Wordsworth and another called Romanticism Revisited looks at some of his fellow writers, whilst Goethe, Schiller and the first romantics looks at the German scene in Jena. 
The Radio 3 Essay broadcast a series called An Ode to John Keats hearing from the writers Sasha Dugdale, Sean O'Brien, Alice Oswald, Francis Leviston and Paul Batchelor

Main image: Portrait miniature of John Keats. Charles Brown after Joseph Severn.  Image courtesy of Keats House, City of London Corporation.  
Keats house website: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/attractions-museums-entertainment/keats-house

READINGS 
Ode to Autumn 
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
On the Sea
Endymion
Letter to John Taylor from Teignmouth
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Letter to Benjamin Bailey
Ode to a Nightingale
This Living Hand
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Letter to Fanny Brawne
Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art

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