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Simon Schama: "AI cannot even dream of competing with Beethoven's string quartets"
Classical music opens a window to the past and offers hope in an uncertain future, says an optimistic Sir Simon Schama.
David Levenson/Getty Images
- Michael Hodges
Published: Monday, 10 August 2026 at 5:00 pm
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This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
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There’s one thing everyone who has heard Key Changes can agree on: it’s brilliant. A comprehensive rebuttal to any charge that Radio 3 is either dumbed down or unreachably highbrow, the show deftly strikes a balance between 40 minutes of music and 20 minutes of conversation.
Its brief is to consider those moments over the last 1,000 years when the social, economic and cultural plates shifted and what we now call classical music moved into a new phase. Presenting duties are handled masterfully by the broadcaster and writer Gillian Moore, who is joined each episode by a historian to expand on the context.
So far, we’ve had Michael Wood on the troubadour songs of medieval Spain and Suzannah Lipscomb on Handel’s Water Music; now Sir Simon Schama has joined for a block of episodes. “It’s Haydn through to the death of Beethoven, then Rossini and beyond,” the 81-year-old beams on a video call from his US home. “I mean, you don’t walk away from that.”
He is, I suggest, a catch for Radio 3: an internationally renowned academic and TV historian whose opinions are often treated as pronouncements coming down from on high. “Not by everyone,” he laughs. “When I get into a London black cab, the first thing the driver will say to me is, ‘You’re quite good, but you got it all wrong about the Battle of Hastings.’” Is that slightly annoying? “I listen respectfully.”
Simon Schama. BBC/Oxford Films and Television Ltd
Schama’s first experience of classical music was hearing his beloved Beethoven as a boy at home in Golders Green in north London. “My father had the Ninth Symphony, which he’d play on our enormous walnut gramophone. It was on 78s, so I remember there being lots of records. But I absolutely loved it.”
This small amount of knowledge helped with the 15-year-old Schama’s romantic endeavours. “I wanted to go out with daughter of the editor of The Jewish Chronicle. Her father said, ‘I’ll let you see Anne, but I need someone to do little classical music reviews, just paragraphs.’ She was a wonderful girl, but I had to say to him, ‘That’s extremely kind of you, Mr Frankel, but I know next to nothing about this.’”
Schama’s initial refusal was, he says, an early manifestation of the “outrageous imposter syndrome” he feels writing about music. But romance soon got the better of reticence. He took the job and got by, borrowing adjectives like “lyrical, tender and passionate” from Neville Cardus’s reviews in The Manchester Guardian.
He still claims that when he talks about music, “my own words are clumsy and amateurish” compared to those of others. But Key Changes proves otherwise. Two shows in when we talk, Schama has already achieved a state of broadcasting grace with Moore. In their discussions, the pair sound softly entwined, sharing their knowledge rather than dispensing it.
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Schama is doing the show because, alongside the Proms, Key Changes epitomises “Radio 3’s mission altogether”. Presenting high culture with “small-p populism” is, he says, one of the great things about the BBC.
In today’s frantic world of smartphones and social media, making the contemplative space of classical music accessible becomes a public service. “It gives you a moment where you just shut out the drone of the world,” he says. “The white noise goes and is replaced by a noise that is gloriously and qualitatively different. It demands your attention, but not in a sit-up-straight-in-your-chair kind of way. It just asks you to surrender.”
He also has some sensational stories to tell. Perhaps the most remarkable is that of the French composer Hélène de Montgeroult, who we hear about in the episode on the French Revolution and its timeless call to arms, La Marseillaise (available now on BBC Sounds).
As an aristocrat during the revolution, de Montgeroult was facing the guillotine. “She was brought up before an expanded session of the Committee of Public Safety,” says Schama. “The circumstances suggest she was in mortal danger. She’d fled the revolution and gone abroad, which was enough to get you a death sentence. My best guess is that the committee were in two minds and wanted to see how she comported herself before they decided on her fate.”
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De Montgeroult is said to have responded by performing a series of keyboard variations on La Marseillaise before the committee. “They brought a box keyboard, a kind of clavichord, stuck it in front of her and she played.” She was duly spared, a remarkable example of music’s ability to affect even the coldest hearts.
But we mustn’t, says Schama, think better of historical figures simply because they were moved by music. “What matters is what they do when they leave the auditorium. Hitler listened to Beethoven and he wasn’t dissuaded from proceeding with the Final Solution. We know that Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted Beethoven’s Ninth for Hitler and senior Nazis in 1942 and the recording survives. It’s one of the absolute all-time great performances of the Choral Symphony.”
What is it like for Schama – a passionate Beethoven devotee and a Jewish man whose 2025 Holocaust documentary The Road to Auschwitz won a BAFTA and an Emmy – to listen to that recording? “It just leaves you with splinters in the heart.”
Despite this paradox, he retains a firm conviction that music can liberate us from our darker thoughts. “Great classical music gives you a sense, particularly at the time when it’s very hard to be cheered up, of the boundless, astonishing creativity of the human mind.”
As Key Changes demonstrates, music can illuminate our understanding of the past, but it can also be a sure guide through a future increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence. “AI cannot even dream of competing with Beethoven’s string quartets,” Schama says. “It will never, ever give you that.”
After everything we have been discussing, it feels like a suitably cheering note on which to end. “You know me,” he says. “Glass-half-full Schama.”
Listen to Key Changes: Radio 3's Essential History of Classical Music on Saturday at 1pm on Radio 3.
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Michael Hodges
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