ANNOUNCER: Major funding provided by: Thank you.

STEVES: Bonjour.

I'm Rick Steves in Paris.

You know, if you looked at the map of Europe 200 years ago, you'd hardly recognize it.

It's missing so many countries.

Today, it's a whole different map, but it didn't just happen.

In the romantic age, the 1800s, national struggles helped to shape my favorite continent.

And I'm fascinated by how music from the same age played a role.

It lifted patriotic spirits like a bugle call on the battlefield.

Hmm, I wonder... What if I could team up with a great orchestra, with a dynamic conductor in the heartland of America and weave in beautiful video images from across Europe to design a musical trip.

Yes, a concert, a symphonic journey where we'd visit seven countries musically, celebrate their national story with their greatest hits of the romantic age and I could be the tour guide.

[applause] STEVES: Thank you.

Thank you.

I am thrilled to be here with all of you on the stage of Historic Music Hall in Cincinnati, Ohio.

[cheers & applause] And we're about to take together a symphonic journey all across Europe.

Are you ready to travel?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

STEVES: Great, because conductor John Morris Russell and the Cincinnati Pops are about to take us to seven countries musically and I get to be your tour guide.

And I'm really in a good mood because I get to mix three of my favorite things together: love of travel, history, and music, as with the help of vivid images and the beautiful music, we appreciate how the turmoil and triumphs of 19th century Europe helped to shape the beautiful world that we live in today.

Our theme is romanticism and nationalism, the isms of the 19th century.

And one thing they had in common was a fundamental yearning for freedom.

We all want to be free.

We want to be free from foreign oppressors.

We want to be free from kings and tyrants.

And we want to be free as individuals to live creative and fulfilling lives.

Well, the music we'll hear is from the romantic era, the 1800s.

And by the way, this is not the giggly, kissy romantic era that you and I might remember from middle school.

Okay.

This is an artistic era that followed the cerebral, logical classical age.

Romanticism was less about the head and more about the heart.

It was a time when people embraced nature and they championed underdog national causes.

It was an age of common people asserting themselves, grabbing the reins of power.

[drums, then music] While this is a European tour, we're starting in the United States, where we celebrate the accomplishments of the American Revolution, the world's first great democratic revolution that helped inspire the flourishing of freedom in 19th century Europe.

America the Beautiful.

[music: America the Beautiful] [applause] STEVES: Wow, that gave me chills.

America the Beautiful.

Those are patriotic goosebumps.

Why?

Because this music celebrates our homeland.

Now, as your tour guide, my challenge is to take that wonderful, if ethnocentric, musical emotion on the road.

Our mission is to appreciate how others thrilled the same way to music of their homeland.

Every nation has its own anthems and each is different.

Our itinerary features romantic era music that stoked the pride of nationalities all across Europe, from Norway to Italy to England.

And we start in Austria, the Hapsburg Empire, where the waltz embodies the elegance and joie de vivre of that society at its peak in the late 1800s.

Now the Habsburgs ruled a vast empire.

They loved music, and they were great patrons of the arts.

That's why Mozart and Beethoven and Brahms all lived and composed in the imperial capital of Vienna.

Now, Johann Strauss was the heartthrob of the romantic period in Vienna.

With his violin, he could whip the audience into a frenzy.

His lilting and twirling waltzes were all the rage.

This piece was written to herald a political summit.

Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was meeting Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria.

It's titled Emperor Waltz.

That's singular, ambiguous on purpose.

Think about it.

Kaiser Wilhelm, Franz Joseph, two imperial egos, each of them were so vain they probably thought this song was about them.

[laughter] Okay.

The number one hit from 1889 by Johann Strauss, Jr., The Emperor Waltz.

[music: Emperor Waltz by Strauss] STEVES: Next up, we sail up the Danube River into Germany.

Now remember, in the mid 1800s, when our next piece was composed, there was no Germany.

It was a piece of real estate about the size of Montana, made up of dozens of little independent German speaking states.

While fragmented, they had a dream in common to create one unified German speaking nation.

Now, in the 19th century, far and wide nation states were coalescing and there were wars.

In the 1860s, when we Americans were fighting about separation, Germans and Italians were fighting about unification.

Wannabe nations, to establish their legitimacy, dug deep, reviving mythic themes to show off their roots.

You see it in the nostalgic art, and you see it in the neo medieval castles of the age.

The famous castles of mad King Ludwig in Bavaria, Neuschwanstein, it looks medieval, but it was actually built about the same time as the Eiffel Tower.

King Ludwig was a huge fan of the romantic composer Richard Wagner.

In fact, many rooms in his castle were inspired by Wagnerian operas.

Wagner's grand operas mixed Germanic myths and medieval traditions and Christian themes that together would stir the souls of his countrymen.

Up next, the rousing prelude to act three from Lohengrin.

[music: Prelude To Act 3 Of Lohengrin] STEVES: Like so many small European nations, the Czech Republic has struggled historically and heroically among big bully neighbors.

Imagine, to the north you've got Prussia, to the south you've got Austria and the Habsburgs, and to the east, Russia.

This is not Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

The 19th century was a time of national awakenings.

From Finland to Bulgaria, small nations were on the rise.

Again, romantic art and romantic music championed underdog causes, and a key figure in the Czech national revival movement was the composer Bedrich Smetana.

Our next piece, The Moldau, gets its title from the Great River that literally and emotionally connects the Czech people.

But Moldau is the river's German name, and the composer, Smetana, would much rather we call it by its Czech name, the Vltava.

Over many difficult centuries, the Vltava helped preserve the language, the culture, and the identity of the Czech people.

The piece is like a landscape portrait.

The melody flows like a stream.

It starts as a tiny brook with flutes frolicking through forests and meadows.

Then, as it grows bigger, more instruments join in.

We hear a merry gathering of peasants.

Later hunters in the forests.

And finally, with rolling timpani and crashing cymbals, will reach the stately capital of Prague.

As you'll hear, this piece and the river it represents embodies the enduring heroic spirit of the Czech people.

To this day, Czechs get a lump in their throat when they hear Smetana's hauntingly beautiful melody, The Vltava.

[music: The Vltava] STEVES: Are you good for some more travel?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

STEVES: I hope so, because we've still got England, Italy, Norway, and France on our itinerary.

This next piece is from Great Britain and it captures the grandeur of what was the world's first superpower.

At the end of the 19th century, Queen Victoria ruled a quarter of the planet.

Her realm was famously the empire upon which the sun never set.

Humming with newfangled inventions from the industrial age, with a middle class that was both educated and prosperous, Britain was on a roll.

Pomp and Circumstance, by Sir Edward Elgar, seems to provide a fitting soundtrack to the confidence that was Britons' at the dawn of the 20th century.

Now, today, we Americans know this piece because we use it at commencement ceremonies to celebrate educational triumphs.

But if you happen to be ruling a vast empire or bushwhacking a brave new future for the common man, this piece works well for other triumphs too.

So now chin up as we travel to England with vivid images and the regal sounds of Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance march No 1.

[music: Pomp and Circumstance No.1] STEVES: And now to Italy with a piece that evokes the struggle of the Italian speaking people to create their own independent country.

Remember before the 1870s, like Germany, Italy was just a bunch of little Italian speaking states fighting bigger powers for their rightful place on the map.

The dream was that the only Italian blooded king, a man who ruled the country of Piedmont, Victor Emmanuel, would be the first king of a united Italy.

The Resurgimiento, as the movement for Italian unification was called, was dangerous.

You could be arrested for just flying the Italian colors of green, white and red.

Italy's favorite music has long been opera with lofty melodies and so melodramatic.

It's a good fit for a land with such emotion where everything is issimo, you know?

And for Italian patriots, the operas of Giuseppe Verdi stirred nationalist spirits like a bugle call on the battlefield.

Now, when a Verdi opera came to town, people packed the house.

The arias, which were like national anthems in disguise, inspired people to actually stand on their seats and sing with gusto, as if raising their voices in unison for Italian statehood.

Even the composer's name, Verdi, became a nationalistic cry for an Italian born king.

V-E-R-D-I, Victor Emmanuel Re d'Italia, King of Italy.

This next piece was composed when Austria ruled much of the Italian land.

It's from the opera Nabucco.

The plot is ancient.

It's from the Old Testament.

The Jews were conquered and then exiled from their homeland by the Babylonians.

The Italians could relate.

In fact, the famous chorus of the Hebrew slaves, VA pensiero, came to symbolize the Italian struggle.

And with so much political symbolism, this opera just barely got by the censors.

By Giuseppe Verdi, here's the stirring Overture from the opera Nabucco.

[music: Nabucco: Overture] [applause] STEVES: Now we travel north to Norway, the land of my grandparents.

Until the 19th century, Norway was under the thumb of Sweden and Denmark.

In fact, back then, the capital city, Oslo was actually named Kristiania after a Danish king.

Now, if you know Norwegians like I do, you know they have a deep seated need to be Norwegian, distinct from the Danes and the Swedes.

In fact, think about this.

The cultural capital, Bergen, is in the far west, in fjord country, about as far from Denmark and Sweden as you can possibly get.

That's where the artists, the writers and the composers gathered.

Part of romanticism and part of nationalism is a love of the wonder of nature.

In their quest for freedom, Norwegians found inspiration in the natural beauty of their homeland.

A popular play back then was based on an old fairy tale, Peer Gynt.

He was the local Huck Finn whose misadventures were set in Norway's majestic nature.

Edvard Grieg set the play to music, and this piece celebrates both the pristine majesty of fjord country, as you'll see, and the pride of the Norwegian way of life.

Here is Morning Mood, from Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg from Norway.

[music: Morning Mood by Edvard Grieg] [applause] STEVES: So, so beautiful.

You know, every time I hear that piece, I think of my uncle Thor from Norway and a story from my childhood.

When I was just a kid, maybe ten years old, Uncle Thor came to visit our family in Seattle.

My mom insisted that I play the piano.

She said, "Rick, play that song you're learning by the Norwegian composer."

So I dutifully played Wedding Day at Troldhaugen by Edvard Grieg.

Uncle Thor was so excited, he gave me a crisp $20 bill.

I had never seen so much money at one time.

[laughter] But you know, his enthusiasm was an even bigger gift than that $20 bill.

I think Uncle Thor planted the seed that would become this concert.

It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

[applause] Thor was demonstrating the joy of two cultures coming together through music, or maybe he was just bribing me to stop playing.

I'm not sure.

[laughter] Okay, no tour of Europe, musical or otherwise, is complete without a stop in France.

France was the home of the enlightenment, the great revolution in so many ways where modern Europe was born.

Now, in the 19th century, France was certainly independent, but its struggles were domestic.

It was the commoners against the aristocracy, the 99% versus the 1%.

With its revolutions, and it took several, the French led the charge in Europe to finally end the medieval old regime.

That notion of divine monarchy, that some were born, ordained by God to rule without limit, and everybody else, well, just deal with it.

Throughout the 19th century, the revolutionary slogan pushing for an end to this old regime was liberté, égalité, fraternité.

This romanticism promoted radical ideals of political freedom.

Imagine government actually by, for, and of the people.

Listening to French music from the 19th century I can almost hear the rabble in the streets.

I find myself cheering liberty, equality, brotherhood, and of course, Vive la France!

Up next, by Camille Saint-Saens, Marche Militaire Francaise, the French Military March.

[music: Marche Militaire Francaise by Saint-Saens] RUSSELL: - Fantastic.

Bravo!

Bravo!

[applause] STEVES: Yes, in so many ways, the Europeans of the romantic age, the 19th century, laid the groundwork for the freedoms that we enjoy today in the 21st century.

And that European passion for freedom continues.

The biggest news of our generation is the transformation of that long bickering continent into a peaceful union, The European Union.

While in practice, it's tough to get that unwieldy collection of proud and distinct nations to do anything in unison, the motto of the European Union is United in Diversity.

And one thing Europe can do well together is to embrace the ideals of its official anthem.

Our final stop is a piece conceived in that 19th century spirit of revolution, set to a poem about universal brotherhood.

This anthem is as relevant today as the day Beethoven set pen to paper.

It calls on all people to come together, to be united joyfully in their diversity and to celebrate freedom.

Now, the finale of our Symphonic Journey, the official anthem of the European Union, Beethoven's Ode to Joy.

[music: Ode to Joy by Beethoven] [cheers & applause] RUSSELL: And now our musical homecoming.

Welcome back to the USA.

Take it away, Rick.

[music: Stars and Stripes Forever by Sousa] [cheers & applause] STEVES: Yeah, what a concert that would be.

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