This week we saw the first episode of Revolution and Romance: Musical Masters of the 19th Century (31 May), a slick but rather undemanding three-part series about classical music.

It was presented by the likeable Suzy Klein, who occasionally sat at the keyboard and joined in the music-making, the equivalent of doing her own stunts. The script, though, was decidedly middlebrow, with a persistent motif in which the master musicians of the nineteenth century were treated as if they were rock stars. Comparing Paganini to Keith Richard – not at all a flamboyant soloist – only annoys fans of both.

The story here was of composers emerging from the anonymity of the eighteenth century, when they were dependent upon the whims of aristocratic patrons, to become self-directed and self-realising artists. Beethoven, first of the breed, became “a true superstar”, a process that began in his lifetime. Klein showed us one of the souvenir busts you can buy today in Vienna, pointing out that they were first cast in 1812, 15 years before his death.