In 1874, Wagner finally completed his monumental opera cycle 'Ring of the Nibelung' – 25 years in the making. In that year, Germans were attempting to forge a national identity from their mythic past, and the rest of Europe was trying to cope with the implications of Darwin's 'Origin of Species' and Marx's 'Das Kapital'. Wagner's music had a grim legacy: the Nazis admired it for aesthetic reasons and for the composer's extreme racist views.
1791 was a year of great political change: Louis XVI was beheaded in France; the US Congress adopted the Bill of Rights and the Constitution; and the ideas of Rousseau and the Enlightenment were all pervasive. It was also the year in which Mozart wrote his enigmatic opera 'The Magic Flute' and his renowned Requiem – and then died. The mysterious circumstances surrounding the commissioning of the latter work led to the myth that the composer had been murdered.
The year is 1564 and Europe is still reeling from the effects of the Reformation. The sacred music of the two churches – Catholic and Protestant – was developing in completely different ways. Instrumental music was also rapidly gaining in importance – as was ballet, championed by Catherine de' Medici, Queen of France. From the violin, which dominated her dance bands, the orchestra would emerge.
In 1937, Fascism gripped Europe and Stalin's terror was at its height. There, composers had to square their consciences with the artistic requirements of totalitarian regimes. In Germany, the music of Kurt Weill was banned because he was Jewish, modern and left wing. While the Nazis were busy banning jazz, in the US, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Billie Holiday were showing it to be the undisputed sound of the moment. And Shostakovich's towering 'Fifth Symphony' was being written at the height of Stalinist oppression.