TIMEPIECE This month in history
At 7.30am on Monday 2 August 1943, just weeks after the Allied Forces invaded Sicily, a new radio programme aired on the BBC Home Service. ‘This Week’s Composer – Mozart’, the running order announced. ‘Programme of Gramophone Records’. Three violin sonatas filled up the 25-minute episode, with soloists Yehudi Menuhin and Szymon Goldberg. Poignantly, on the day when several hundred inmates of the Treblinka extermination camp were shot dead in an escape attempt, all five featured artists on This Week’s Composer were of Jewish extraction.
Not all of the listeners to that first episode were impressed. One, finding the content a little highfalutin, wrote to the Radio Times requesting ‘lighter music in the early hours to provide a most necessary contrast to This Week’s Composer’. The BBC, however, was more optimistic. Its annual report for 1943 referred to the show as ‘an innovation which proved that lovers of serious music are awake in large numbers as early in the morning as 7.30am’.
Eighty years on, the same programme, now titled Composer of the Week, is still going strong, although there have inevitably been changes along the way. Episodes are now an hour long and run Monday to Friday (there was originally a Saturday episode too) – nor do listeners have to be early risers, as the programme airs at noon. And nowadays there is a specialist presenter, whereas in 1943 it was the duty continuity announcer who introduced the records from a prepared typescript. And, of course, Composer of the Week today sits on Radio 3, the Home Service having long since disbanded.
Changes of format and emphasis have, however, done nothing to erode the programme’s exceptional longevity – only the perennially popular Desert Island Discs has been running longer. So why has Composer of the Week proved so doughtily indestructible? ‘Because,’ current presenter Donald Macleod says, ‘week after week we tell these fascinating stories – sometimes tragic, sometimes uplifting – of people who have achieved remarkable things, often in very difficult circumstances, creating music which speaks to us in such powerful ways.’
Some core composers are revisited on a more-or-less annual basis, Bach, Mozart, Brahms and Schumann among them. But in its eight-decade span Composer of the Week has cast its net extraordinarily widely, with less well known names like Obrecht, Cabezon, Tye and Quantz all enjoying their moment in the spotlight.
As with the music world in general, though, female compose
