Albinoni's Adagio

In 1773, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American to publish a collection of poems. Jade Cuttle looks at the way her poems were described and asks what do we categorise as nature writing? Her essay considers the idea of "coining" and the work of a new generation of poet ...  Show more

What connects actors with baristas? In 1983, the American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild published a book called The Managed Heart which studied the working world of airline stewards. Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal’s essay considers what it means when a waiter smiles as they serve ...  Show more

Errollyn Wallen is one of the world’s most performed living composers. Her work, which includes 22 operas, orchestral, chamber and vocal works, was played at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games in 2012 and at Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees. She was the ...  Show more

There are few artists who are praised with the same level of hyperbole as Wolfgang Mozart. The German poet Franz Alexander von Kleist once said “Mozart's music is so beautiful as to entice angels down to earth.” The famous Russian composer Tchaikovsky declared that Mozart was no ...  Show more

How did the tomb of Austria's great composer come to contain not one skull, but two? The story of Haydn's head leads us into the murky world of 19th-century medicine, complete with grave robbing and some gruesome pseudo-science. Be warned, this episode contains descriptions that ...  Show more

In the mid 19th century, the way to make yourself famous in France as a composer was to write operas. From Cherubini, to Meyerbeer, to Bizet, to Berlioz, to Gounod, to Massenet, to Offenbach, to Saint Saens, to foreign composers who wrote specifically for the Paris ...