1897: Lying in the gutter, looking at the stars

1897, Vienna. On a cold February morning in Hamburg, Gustav Mahler is baptised into the Catholic Church. Born into a Jewish family in Bohemia, he hopes the conversion will remove one final obstacle to securing the most coveted musical position in Europe: a post at the Vienna Court Opera. Within weeks, his gamble pays off.

Mahler arrives in a city alive with artistic and intellectual ferment. Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession are breaking with artistic convention, Sigmund Freud is developing radical new ideas about the unconscious, and a younger generation is challenging the values of the nineteenth century. Yet beneath the glamour of imperial Vienna lie growing political tensions, rising antisemitism and profound uncertainty about the future.

From Mahler's vast symphonies and Richard Strauss's orchestral innovations to Puccini's psychologically acute operas, composers seek new ways of expressing a rapidly changing world. Their music captures both the beauty and the unease of the fin de siècle, standing on the threshold between Romanticism and Modernism.

Gillian Moore is joined by a roster of distinguished historians for this major new BBC Radio 3 series, charting a course through 1000 years of classical music history. For the next eight programmes, historian Rana Mitter is in the chair, as together they explore the turbulent, technological world emerging at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Producer: Zerlina Vulliamy
Academic Consultant: Professor Laura Tunbridge, University of Oxford
Story Consultant: Kate Leys
Series Editor for BBC Audio: Emma Harding

Key Changes theme tune composed by Joseph Howard and performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Kerem Hasan.

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2 "Resurrection" – First Movement

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 2 "Resurrection" – Finale

Richard Wagner: Prelude to Lohengrin

Richard Strauss: Don Juan

Alma Mahler: Song for Voice and Piano

Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 5 – Adagietto

Giacomo Puccini: La bohème – "Che gelida manina"

Richard Strauss: Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils

Arnold Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 1

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