An audio exploration
Adam Wagner writes:
Where do human rights come from? In this special musical episode, I speak to Tom Blackmore, grandson of David Maxwell-Fyfe, the Nuremberg Trials prosecutor and founding figure in the modern human rights movement. As Europe again is at war, a timely reminder of how a previous generation saw human rights as the answer.
Join Thos as he revisits a conversation with celebrated songwriter Sue Casson about her seminal musical masterwork, Dreams of Peace and Freedom, currently on a national tour, and learn how this piece has become part of a multiplatform experience entitled Songs of the People.
From Magna Carta to Victorian Scottish land clearances, via the Nuremburg War Trials to Southwark Cathedral in 2025, Songs of the People encompasses international history, philosophy and democracy in a breadth of exciting and thoughtful ways - but always with achingly beautiful music at its core. Songs of the People is an epic entertainment for the generations. Don't miss this bumper episode!
The original cast studio recording of Sue Casson's Dreams of Peace & Freedom features the voices of David Maxwell Fyfe's great- grandchildren, Lily and Robert with the composer. This beautiful song cycle weaves words from David's personal papers with original musical settings of poetry that inspired him to tell the story of his journey from Nuremberg, where he was a British prosecutor, to Strasbourg, where he became an artisan of ECHR. For him this was all One Story.
