Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right?

It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music

when it's out of ice cream.

Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds.

Hello, if we cast our minds over Beethoven and the poetry of the German Romantics, Friedrich Schiller will almost certainly spring to mind.

Schiller's Ode to Joy is, after all, the crowning glory of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and the two seem inseparable to us today.

The verve and intensity of the music reflect a natural amplification of Schiller's idealistic

vision of a brotherhood of man. Yet, however inevitable, the pairing of music and words may seem

to us now, it posed quite a challenge for Beethoven. He felt that putting Schiller to music was a task that would require him to somehow outsaw the poet,

and it took him years before he found a way of incorporating it into a composition,

harder even than setting the words of Schiller's great contemporary Goethe to music.

So to explore Beethoven's complex relationship with the poets and the poetry of his day,

I'm joined by two leading literary historians, Karen Lieder and Robert Vellane.

Karen Schiller seems a natural place for us to start. What was it about the Ode Joy that's so

captivated Beethoven? Well, it's an extraordinary poem to start with, I think.

But it's more than that.

I mean, it captures Andy Freude, the German,

and perhaps it would be worth reading it to start with,

just a snippet.

Andy Freude.

Freude, Schö gutter funking,

tochter

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