Maria Margaronis explores the legacy of Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb whose shots sparked the Great War. His deeds, memory and legacy remain contested in the Balkans and beyond.
Emma Jane Kirby considers the idea of London presenting to both the wider world and Britons themselves in 1914. And she assesses how far these attitudes still resonate today.
Tom Service takes a litmus test of the classical music goings-on in London in 1914 and finds Modernist Moments by native composers thin on the ground. Two songs by Frank Bridge, Where She Lies Asleep, and Love Went a-riding, written that year,
Jonathan Pryce reads a fictional postcard from London just before WW1, where Vaughan Williams seems to have caught the imagination of the city. Written by Dr Kate Kennedy
Professor Roy Foster, the journalist and author Nick Cohen, Baroness Shirley Williams, Duncan Brack of the Liberal Democrat Party History Group and the author Bea Campbell join Philip Dodd to discuss a Landmark book which explores the collapse
Tom Service uncovers a world of startling sounds and heightened feeling in Alexander Scriabin’s final composition, the Five Preludes Op.74. Written in 1914 in St Petersburg, months before Scriabin died, here is music riddled with the ambiguitie
Jonathan Pryce reads a fictional postcard set in the St. Petersburg Conservatoire just before The Great War broke out, looking at the music of the time, particularly Prokofiev. Written by David Nice
Stephen Evans, the BBC's Berlin Correspondent, reminds us that the German capital on the eve of war was the world's most innovative technological centre. Einstein was here, the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics from 1914. Mar
Tom Service introduces Ferrucio Busoni’s Zwei Tanzstűcke Op.30a (Two Dance Studies), a piano work that captures the vibe of Berlin in early 1914. Tom also takes a glance at the frenetic music scene of the city of the time.
Foreign Correspondent Hugh Schofield reimagines the French capital of Maurice Ravel, the Ballets Russes and Henri Matisse - but which politically suffered continuing angst over its neighbour across the Rhine: Germany.
Jonathan Pryce reads a fictional postcard from an enthusiastic concert goer in Paris just before the outbreak of WW1 which looks at the musical temperature of the time. Written by Dr Caroline Potter
Bethany Bell, the BBC's Vienna Correspondent, evokes both the public face of Austria-Hungary's capital and the simmering tensions which underlay its multi-national empire on the eve of the greatest conflagration the world had yet seen.
Tom Service with Webern's Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano Op.11. Followed by music which would have been heard at a concert in Vienna with the Konzertverein orchestra in February 1914.
Jonathan Pryce reads a fictional postcard set in Vienna just before the outbreak of WW1 that asks whether Vienna really was the musical capital of Europe. Written by Professor David Wyn Jones