Words and Music 22 December

[Anna]

I'm listening to this now. It's a repeat from February of this year. Have I missed something terribly vital in the R3 schedules? Is this programme usually on at the Witching Hour and so that is why I have not heard it? It's marvellous and so enjoyable.

Tonight is about Money. Money makes the world go round. It also tends to bring out the worst in people, and a wealth of novels and poems have been written on and around the subject. The gentlemen in Jane Austen's novels usually have plenty of it, while the unfortunate Katerina Ivanovna in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment certainly does not. Defoe's Moll Flanders and F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby are on the make, while characters in Dickens and E Nesbit are in a ruinous state through losing their money. And Martin Amis's John Self thinks he's making money, later to find that he's actually losing it too.

Sylvestra Le Touzel and Dan Stevens read poems and texts which show the impact money, or lack of money has on literary characters' lives, with music by Beethoven, Puccini, Stravinsky and Abba (!)

[zola]

It used to be on at the witching hour on a Sunday night ( it would have been in February ) but since the September schedule changes its' regular time is now six thirty on Sunday evening after The Choir.

[Anna]

Oh thank you Zola. I guess being on a Sunday is why I missed it as I wasn't around. I shall look out for it in the New Year in the Sunday early evening schedule.