Music theatre and the art of melancholy

Presenter Tom Service visits the Pit Theatre at the Barbican to learn more about a new theatrical meditation on the bittersweet consolations of sorrow. He speaks to countertenor Iestyn Davies about the melancholy of John Dowland’s music and its power to process grief, while the director Netia Jones tells Tom how she’s weaved together creative visuals with philosophical musings of Robert Burton’s 17th-century treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy as well as those of Freud and other contemporary experts of the human condition. As the BBC celebrates its centenary, Music Matters is joined by composers Matthew Herbert and Anna Meredith, and Artistic Associate of the Southbank Gillian Moore, to discuss the corporation’s role as a commissioner of contemporary repertoire during the past 100 years. Tom catches-up with composer Tom Floyd, singer Sophie Goldrick, and Professor Marion Thain during rehearsals of a new opera, Veritable Michael, which charts the creative life and love affair of two women who operated together under the pseudonym Michael Field – a 19th century fictional author whose work was celebrated by the likes of Oscar Wilde and Robert Browning. And Tom takes a trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum where he’d joined by Harriet Reed, the co-curator of Re:Imagining Musicals – a new display of glittering costumes and musical memorabilia – to explore the craftmanship, creative renewal, and evolutionary impetus behind some of the most iconic musicals of the past seven decades.