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From teenage compositions by Mozart to fictional images of Professors and boffins, via artists, scientists and star performers - today's programme explores ideas about genius. What is genius? What makes a prodigy? Or, crowns a polymath? We hear definitions from writers including Helen Lewis, Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw and descriptions of figures such as Bryon’s daughter the mathematician, Ada Lovelace, the painter Leonardo da Vinci, American President Abraham Lincoln and writer Gertrude Stein. Poems by Wordsworth and Pope explore the idea of the genius loci, the power of a place and the novels Lessons in Chemistry, Chocky and Matilda give us pictures of exceptional children. The composers featured include Bach, Mozart,Clara Schumann and Beethoven.

Our readers are Django Bevan and Sasha McCabe

Producer: Ruth Watts

Readings

The Genius Myth by Helen Lewis
Hamlet by William Shakeapeare
Shakespeare: A Tribute by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Spanish Drama by GH Lewes
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
The Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari
Our Lady of the Rocks by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Notes from Deep Time by Helen Gordon
An Epistle to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington by Alexander Pope
Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Byron
The Vast Extent: On seeing and not seeing further by Lavinia Greenlaw
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Me from myself by Emily Dickinson
Genius by Mark Twain
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Preface to St Joan by George Bernard Shaw
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Einstein’s Happiest Moment by Richard M Berlin
Chocky – John Wyndham
Matilda by Roald Dahl
Genius by Billy Collins
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Wolf