Your high-brow Halloween soundtrack has arrived. BBC Radio 3’s Words and Music, a show that sets poems and other writing to classical music, celebrates the holiday with an episode on witches and sorcerers.
The 74-minute episode features a diverse cast of magical individuals from the literary canon, including the Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, Goethe’s 1797 poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” C.S. Lewis’s titular villain of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, and Shakespeare’s magician Prospero from The Tempest. The classical music by composers like Tchaikovsky and Vivaldi is interspersed with theme-appropriate blues and jazz hits like Nina Simone’s “I’ll Put a Spell on You” and Eartha Kitt’s “I’d Rather Be Burned as a Witch.”
Listen to the program over on the BBC website.
[h/t BBC]
Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.
October 31, 2016 – 12:45pm