The Canon Club

Anton Bruckner was born in 1824 in Ansfelden near Linz in Upper Austria, the eldest of eleven children born to a schoolmaster. He became a teacher then was appointed an organist, eventually moving to Vienna. Bruckner was a late developer as a composer, lacking confidence in his abilities. After various early efforts including two preparatory symphonies he wrote nine fully recognised symphonies, three sacred masses, a Te Deum and motets. Although often mocked as a country bumpkin, he came by the end of his life to be recognised as one of the era's great orchestral composers. He died in 1896.

Dr. Bryan Gilliam is an emeritus professor of Duke University and an authority on the music of Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss among others.

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The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature. 

It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna. 

An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen. 

This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon. 

The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience. 

Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack. 

Paul Morland is a nationally-renowned expert in demographics, and the author of several books. 

In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon: 

E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon

E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini

E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam

E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett

E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill

E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes

E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s later and darkest tragedies. Set in eleventh-century Scotland, it tells the story of how Macbeth, triumphant and promoted by the King after triumph in battle, has his future Kingship foretold by three witches and is moved, with the encouragement of his wife, to murder the king and take the throne. Macbeth and his wife are consumed by guilt and madness. Macbeth commits more murder to shore up his position but eventually falls himself to a revolt.

To discuss it, Paul and Ed are joined by Neema Parvini, author of over ten books, including Shakespeare's Moral Compass, and a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Heterodox Studies, the University of Buckinghamshire.

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The Canon Club is a show about the Western canon: the great cultural inheritance we're handed, across music, art, and literature. 

It was born of a blog by Ed West, in which he pined for a return to the schools of art and literary appreciation that were so famous in pre-WWI Vienna. 

An era when people took seriously their commitment to appreciating the art that had come before them: from Beowulf to The Divine Comedy, from Goya to Beethoven, from Brahms to Ibsen. 

This podcast is that latter-day Viennese salon. 

The Western canon is everyone's birthright, even if most of us feel under-educated in it. Paul and Ed have set out to reclaim it for themselves, and thereby transmit it to a wider audience. 

Ed West is a prominent British journalist, and the author of the wildly popular Wrong Side of History Substack. 

Paul Morland is a nationally-renowned expert in demographics, and the author of several books. 

In Season One, they'll be inducting one person or movement per episode into The Canon: 

E01: Caravaggio with Andrew Graham Dixon

E02: Macbeth with Neema Parvini

E03: Anton Bruckner with Bryan Gilliam

E04: Anna Karenina with Rosamund Bartlett

E05: The Romanesque with John McNeill

E06: Thomas Mann with Tobias Boes

E07: Van Gogh with Martin Gayford

Born outside Milan in 1571, Michaelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio trained in a local workshop and then launched himself as an artist in Rome in his early 20s. His striking and highly individual style won him wide acclaim and patronage from high levels in the Church and the aristocracy.

But his quarrelsome personality and violence meant he was in and out of jail and culminated in his committing a murder, fleeing to Naples, Malta and Sicily and dying short of forty. 

Andrew Graham Dixon, one of the UK’s leading art historians, has called Caravaggio ‘the most wildly popular of all the old masters’.

In this episode, he details how, plague claimed his father, grandfather, and grandmother in quick succession. Caravaggio’s mother raised the remaining children in poverty, but she, too, died when the future artist was in his early teens.

We learn of how he developed the technique chiaroscuro, the sharp contrast between light and dark, to create a more lurid, cinematic perspective on religious art. Once he moved to Rome, Caravaggio became box office, producing works that shocked and captivated audiences.

His paintings were notable for their realism—biblical figures were depicted not as distant, ethereal beings but as ordinary people, often poor and rough, with dirt under their nails and wrinkles on their faces.

Yet despite his success, Caravaggio’s volatility unsettled those around him. He was arrested multiple times, and, in 1606, when killed a man in a duel, likely over a woman. Forced to flee Rome, Caravaggio sought refuge in Naples, then in Malta, with the infamous Knights of Malta, before dying tragically young.

Paul Morland and Ed West are trying to get to grips with the Western canon.

Like most of us, they feel under-read and incompetent in the presence of the great Western artistic inheritance. The stuff that shaped our civilisation. From Thomas Mann's Death In Venice, to Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. From Macbeth to A Doll's House, Goya to Goethe, Canterbury Tales to The Ring Cycle.

It's a world we often neglect, because it feels a little too intimidating, obscure, or dusty.

Canon Club is Paul and Ed's attempt to redeem themselves - and their listeners. Every alternate week, for an initial season of seven episodes, Paul and Ed take on a different cultural behemoth, talking to a world expert, to explore the deep story.

Ed West is the author of the Wrong Side Of History Substack, and a prominent journalist.

Paul Morland is a demographer and the author of several books.

This is the series trailer.