Giuseppe Verdi: How Personal Tragedy Forged Italy's Greatest Opera Composer
Giuseppe Verdi lost his two young children and his first wife within three years, nearly abandoned music entirely, and then channeled that grief into the operas that made him the most beloved composer...
15 Jun 24min
Hector Berlioz: The Obsessive Romantic Who Reinvented the Orchestra
Hector Berlioz wrote the Symphonie fantastique — a symphony about a lovesick artist who hallucinates his own execution — because he was obsessively in love with an Irish actress who did not know he ex...
15 Jun 20min
George Frideric Handel: The Sword-Fighting, Market-Crashing Composer Who Wrote Messiah in Twenty-Four Days
George Frideric Handel fought a duel with a fellow composer, survived a sword thrust that was stopped by a coat button, went bankrupt running opera companies, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his righ...
15 Jun 13min
Gustav Mahler: The Tortured Conductor Who Built the Bridge From Romanticism to Modern Music
Gustav Mahler said "my time will come" — and he was right, though he did not live to see it. During his lifetime, he was famous as the greatest orchestral conductor of his age but dismissed as a secon...
15 Jun 23min
Greta Thunberg: From Lonely School Striker to the Most Polarizing Climate Activist on Earth
Greta Thunberg was a fifteen-year-old with Asperger's who sat alone outside the Swedish parliament with a hand-painted sign reading "School Strike for Climate." Within two years, she had addressed the...
15 Jun 15min
Francisco Goya: The Court Painter Who Covered His Walls With Monsters
Francisco Goya spent the first half of his career as Spain's most celebrated court painter — bright tapestry designs, flattering royal portraits, cheerful scenes of aristocratic life. Then illness lef...
15 Jun 21min
George Gershwin: The Genius Who Bridged Jazz and Classical Music and Died of a Brain Tumor at Thirty-Eight
George Gershwin wrote Rhapsody in Blue, Porgy and Bess, and "Summertime" — bridging the gap between jazz and classical music more successfully than any composer before or since. Then, at the peak of h...
15 Jun 21min
Kurt Vonnegut: From a Meat Locker in Dresden to Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, sheltered in an underground meat locker while the city above him burned. He spent the next twenty-three years trying to write ab...
15 Jun 19min
