How did opera become an art form consumed today by millions of people globally on computer screens, in cinemas and on the radio? And how, in particular, did New York's Metropolitan Opera become one of the most iconic and powerful producers of this Old World export? Flora Willson traces the roots of today's phenomenon of opera in cinemas to the years 1890-1930, when New York emerged as a global operatic centre. The programme shows how the Met took the initiative in those decades, exploiting new developments in transatlantic travel, the recording industry and radio broadcasting. And Flora considers how today opera is bursting out of the plush velvet curtains and tapping into mass audiences everywhere by embracing the potential of new technologies. Today you can have the thrill of this extraordinary and overwhelming experience in the home, on the move and at the local cinema. This is a hefty counterpunch to the clichéd view that opera is a dead art form only consumed by the cultural elite. With contributions from Peter Gelb (General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera), Kasper Holten (outgoing Director of Opera at the Royal Opera House), Mark Schubin (Engineer-in-Charge at the Metropolitan Opera), Barrie Kosky (opera director), Stuart Skelton (tenor), Gundula Kreuzer (musicologist, Yale) and Ben Walton (musicologist, Cambridge).

Kevin Le Gendre presents a portrait of musician and spiritual leader, Alice Coltrane

The controversial French composer Boulez made three life-changing trips to South America.

In the Nazi camps and ghettos a vast range of music was created

Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough on how different cultures have viewed the end of the world

Christian Weikop, examines Kandinsky's Russian roots.

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Did Freud really dislike music as much as he professed? Stephen Johnson explores Sigmund Freud's enigmatic relationship with music. He talks to the American cultural analyst Michelle Duncan, pscyho-analysts and writers Darian Leader and Julie Jaffee Nagel, the music critic David Nice, whose first job it was to take tours around the Freud Museum in Hampstead, and the Barcelona-based neurologist Josep Marco Pallares who is studying amusia and music-specific anhedonia, which he proposes might have been the root cause of Freud's problem with music. Plus extracts from Freud's writings read by the actor Nicholas Murchie.

Producer, Elizabeth Arno

Part of Radio 3's "Breaking Free - the minds that changed music", exploring the music of the Second Viennese School.

David Attenborough recalls collecting music from around the world, and listens once again

Is the avant-garde dead? Paul Morley conducts an autopsy, but detects signs of life ...

Sandeep Parmar retraces the steps of "Paris", a lost Modernist masterpiece by poet Hope Mirlees, and Daniel Lee explores the fate of North Africa's Jewish communities during WW2.