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Classic FM Breakfast with Dan Walker 6:30am - 9am
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Classical Music, Sunday 15 March 2014, 9pm.
It's Mothering Sunday today, and Catherine Bott has another musical question to answer: "How were the great composers inspired by mothers - especially their own?"
After Brahms’s mother passed away in February 1865, the composer descended into grief and set about writing A German Requiem. We'll hear a particularly poignant moment tonight.
Catherine also features beautiful tender moments from Ravel’s Mother Goose and Dvorak’s Songs My Mother Taught Me.
There's pure musical cheese too: Neapolitan song 'Mamma', sung by Luciano Pavarotti, and the Vienna Boys Choir singing 'My mother was a Viennese'.
Paul Carr’s much more recent Requiem for an Angel was also written for his mother, and Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A minor was written during one of the most tragic times of the composer’s life - shortly after the passing of his own mother (pictured). Mozart poured his torment into this dark piece, being the first of only two sonatas he wrote in a minor key.