Muses. Six people who have inspired great music.

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you.  And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for today it is… Muses… in particular six people who have inspired composers to write great music.

I am sure there are thousands of instances of amazing music we have today that was inspired by love, passion or obsession…  for a particular person… but only in a handful of cases has the detail of the person who was the inspiration… the muse… become publicly linked to a work. And in the next hour I’m going to tell you the stories of six of them… Alma Schindler, Josephine Brunsvik, Kamila Stösslová, Peter Pears, Clara Wieck and Mathilde Wesendonck. And you’ll hear music by Gustav Mahler, Ludwig van Beethoven, Leos Janacek, Benjamin Britten, Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner.

When Alma Mahler-Werfel died in New York in 1964 she was one of the most influential figures in the world of classical music. As the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler she was at the forefront of the process that rehabilitated the reputation of Mahler’s music. Her story is of course way more complex and there is a terrific article about her by Alex Ross from February 2025 on the New Yorker Magazine’s website. But in 1901 when she met Mahler she was Alma Maria Schindler a beautiful and accomplished woman in her early twenties and a year later the two of them would be married and Mahler would be completing his 5th symphony. The fourth section of the symphony, today known as the ‘Adagietto’ (which is just Italian for Mahler’s speed instruction of ‘slightly slow’); has become probably Mahler’s best known piece of music and the available evidence presents a pretty strong case that this was intended as a musical love-letter from Mahler to his young bride.

Here it is in a live recording of the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Klaus Tennstedt. It is about twelve minutes long. Gustav Mahler’s Adagietto from his 5^th Symphony… for his wife Alma.

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That was Gustav Mahler’s Adagietto from his 5^th Symphony. The London Philharmonic Orchestra was conducted by Klaus Tennstedt.

Next up in this episode of Muses… people who inspired composers… is Josephine Brunsvik born into the Austro-Hungarian nobility who lived from 1779 to 1821. If you look at the story of her life it is really an achingly sad example of the powerlessness of women that even a background of wealth could not combat. Her two marriages, essentially arranged by her parents, were to men not of her choosing and after her second husband deserted her she died in poverty at the age of 42. But in Vienna two decades earlier her life was quite different. It seems that she and her young piano teacher became very fond of each other. That piano teacher was Ludvig van Beethoven. Beethoven’s biographers have struggled for years to identify who it was that he referred to as his ‘immortal beloved’ in a famous unsent letter written in 1812. Josephine Brunsvik is one of the leading candidates. Regardless of that conjecture the two of them remained in at times close contact through most of their lives even though the class difference meant that marriage was never an option and it is not unreasonable to infer that this was a lasting love for both of them. And there is a lot of Beethoven’s music that writers suggest was inspired by Joesphine but there is only one that the evidence directly supports. It is a slow piece of solo piano music from 1803 that was meant to be a part of his 21^st Piano sonata but he later removed it and it exists as a stand-alone piece called the ‘Andante favori’. Meaning simply ‘a favoured andante’… andante just being an indication to play the piece at a walking pace. Here it is played by Sviatoslav Richter. It is about eight minutes long… Ludwig van Beethoven’s ‘Andante Favori’.  Written for Josephine Brusnvik.

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That was Ludwig van Beethoven’s ‘Andante Favori’ played by Sviatoslav Richter.

Next up in this episode of Classical For Everyone devoted to muses is one where the age difference was, to be frank, pretty close to comical. Maybe that is something to do with the perspective a century later but when they met Kamila Stösslová was 25 and the composer Leos Janacek was 63. Both were married but this did not stop Janacek from becoming obsessed with Kamilla and inspired by her. He wrote over 700 letters to her over the next decade and he dedicated his second string quartet to her in 1928… and left her the income from its royalties in his will. He gave the quartet the title of ‘Intimate Letters’ and here is the six-minute long, second section performed by the Pavel Haas quartet. Janacek’s 2^nd String Quartet… dedicated to his muse… Kamila Stösslova.

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That was the Pavel Haas quartet performing the second section of Leos Janacek’s 2^nd String Quartet.

Ok. In 1937 a young English singer met a young English composer. What started as a friendship a couple of years later became an affair and then ultimately a life-long romance and creative partnership. The singer’s name was Peter Pears and the composer was Benjamin Britten. For most of his life Britten wrote music for Pears to perform. In contrast to many of the muse stories in this episode their love was not unrequited, not short-lived, and did not remain platonic. And it was not just one or two pieces of music that Pears inspired. Britten wrote several of the best operas of the 20^th century for Pears including Peter Grimes, Billy Budd and Death in Venice. His mammoth War Requiem from 1963 is dominated by the tenor part Britten wrote for Pears. I’ve got two short examples of the music that Pears inspired for Britten. The first is the song ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ from the 1945 opera Peter Grimes. Grimes is a fisherman in a small English village and his apprentice dies in an accident at sea and, already an outsider, the village turns on Grimes and the drama of the opera is how ‘guilty’ or otherwise Grimes is and how his anger at the villages’ accusations ultimately drives him to madness… and death. But in this one moment Grimes sings with such beauty that you get a glimpse of a great soul buried under the weight of circumstance and events as he sings of the insignificance of humans in an unfeeling universe. Here is Peter Pears singing ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ from Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes and the composer conducts the orchestra of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. It is about 4 minutes long and it starts very quietly.

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That was Peter Pears singing ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ from his partner Benjamin Britten’s opera ‘Peter Grimes’ and the composer conducted the orchestra of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Another example of the way Pears inspired Britten was to find neglected works and use their combined star power to revive them. Here is a recording of the song ‘When A Cruel Long Winter’ from Henry Purcell’s 1692 semi-opera ‘The Fairly Queen’; which had been presumed lost until the middle of the 20^th century and this was the very first recording. Here is Peter Pears singing the role of Phoebus, the sun god, and Benjamin Britten conducting the English Chamber Orchestra.

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That was Peter Pears singing the role of Phoebus, the sun god, and Benjamin Britten conducting the English Chamber Orchestra with the song ‘When A Cruel Long Winter’ from Henry Purcell’s 1692 semi-opera ‘The Fairly Queen’. The pianist and composer Clara Weick had a profound and muse-like influence on two other great composers… her husband Robert Schumann and their sort of combined protégé Johannes Brahms. Schumann died tragically young and Clara and Johannes found a sort of solace in an intense friendship for the rest of their lives that seems to have been appropriately chaste for a relationship between a widow and the best friend of her husband. But it was an intense and long-lived passion that resulted in a number of compositions by Brahms that are considered directly inspired by Clara. I’m going to play you a section of just one of them.  Very near the end of Clara’s life Brahms went to visit her and in his  Brahms biography, the composer and author Jan Swafford describes the meeting…

Next morning Clara’s daughter Eugenie heard the sound of the piano from the music room. Two pieces from Brahms’s Opus 118, music he had written to sustain Clara, and which she loved. When the music stopped Eugenie went into the room and found her mother at her writing table, her cheeks flushed and eyes shining, and Brahms sitting opposite her with tears in his eyes. Gently he said to Eugenie, “Your mother has been playing most beautifully for me.” Here is Wilhelm Kempf playing one of those pieces. An Intermezzo by Johannes Brahms from 1893… For and inspired by… Clara Schumann.

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That was Wilhelm Kempf playing An Intermezzo by Johannes Brahms from 1893. The full details are on the episode page at classicalforeveryone.net.

Alright. The final muse in this episode inspired what is probably the most romantic opera of the late nineteenth century, if not all time, and I am going to play you the overture from it in a moment. But whilst the composer was writing the opera, the husband of his muse was paying all the composer’s bills… allowing he and his wife (yes the composer was also married) to live in exile in a not too shabby house overlooking a lake in Switzerland. And this was just one chapter in the very complicated emotional life of one Richard Wagner. The name of the young woman in question was Mathilde Wesendonck and she and her husband Otto became equally devoted to Wagner’s genius after meeting him in Zurich and this led to a friendship along with massive financial support from Otto even as his wife and Wagner fell in love. The relationship seems to have been the nail in Wagner’s marriage to his first wife Minna but the marriage of Otto and Mathilde seems to have survived whatever Wagner and Mathilde’s relationship was. The opera his obsession with Mathilde inspired was Tristan and Isolde from 1858. The plot retells the story of a medieval love between two honourable people who are tricked into taking a love potion. Writers have argued that this is sort of Wagner arguing that his love for Mathilde was ‘beyond his control’. Here is the eleven minute overture to Tristan and Isolde with the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra conducted by Karl Böhm. Inspired by Mathilde Wesendonck.

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That was the overture to Richard Wagner’s 1858 opera Tristan and Isolde with the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra conducted by Karl Böhm. To give you another small example of the complexities of Wagner’s personal life… he ultimately married the then wife of the man who conducted the first performances of Tristan and Isolde... Hans von Bülow.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. And a special thanks to my friend and friend of the show… Elise Elliott for the suggestion of this theme for the episode. This really has been ‘fur elise’. If you would like to listen to past episodes or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net There you will also find some mini-episodes that address some of what I want to call the vexing questions for a listener new to Classical Music like… ‘Are conductors actually important?’; ‘Why does the word ‘sonata’ keep turning up?’ and ‘Why is almost everything in Italian?’. I hope you have enjoyed this episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’. If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts. That would also mean the search algorithms will smile more benignly on the show and it might reach a few more people. For that I would be very grateful. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net. Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’.

This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never.

And if you have listened to the credits… here is a little bonus for you… There is an argument that Beethoven’s only opera ‘Fidelio’… which is about the strength of marriage… was inspired by his affection for the unattainable Josephine Brunsvik. So here to conclude this Muses episode is a song from early in the opera where four characters describe the love they feel. The title is ‘Mir ist so wunderbar’… which in English is ‘I feel so wonderful’. The singers are Helen Donath, Helga Dernesch, Horst Laubenthal and Karl Ridderbusch. Herbert von Karajan conducts the Berlin Philharmonic.

Thanks for listening.