Alice Pemberton: In nineteen seventy-seven, the Mikoyan MiG-twenty-nine makes its first flight, built to challenge America's newest fighter jets. Alice Pemberton: In twenty twenty-five, Alberta's teachers walk out across the province, closing classrooms to hundreds of thousands of pupils. Alice Pemberton: And in sixteen eighty-three, immigrant families found Germantown, Pennsylvania. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the sixth of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on how Austria-Hungary took Bosnia on the strength of a conversation nobody wrote down; Arthur Nightingale on William Tyndale, who gave England its Bible and begged his jailers for a warmer coat; Judge Marion Calloway rules on who owns the first opera; and Rufus McCrae on The Jazz Singer's two minutes of talk. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen-oh-eight, an empire annexed a province it already ran — and broke the peace of Europe doing it. For the front page, our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: A province it already ran — that's the absurdity. Austria-Hungary had governed Bosnia and Herzegovina for thirty years, while the Ottoman Sultan kept the title. Then the Young Turk revolution gave Constantinople a constitution, and Emperor Francis Joseph wrote to the Kaiser: 'Since a constitution can be granted only by a sovereign power, I shall find myself forced to announce the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.' Alice Pemberton: And Russia simply let it happen? Professor Edmund Cavendish: That's the mystery. Weeks earlier, the two foreign ministers, Aehrenthal and Izvolsky, met at Buchlau Castle in Moravia, and no minutes survive. Aehrenthal said Russia had promised a 'friendly and benevolent attitude' in return for help opening the Straits to Russian warships. Izvolsky swore the talk was purely theoretical. Alice Pemberton: One conversation, two memories. Professor Edmund Cavendish: And two countries that never forgave Vienna: Russia and Serbia. Six years later Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the empire that annexed Bosnia to keep it did not outlive the war. Nobody wrote Buchlau down. Europe paid for the missing minutes. Alice Pemberton: On this day in fifteen thirty-six, by tradition, England's great Bible translator died at the stake — and his last surviving letter asks for a warmer coat. Our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale, on William Tyndale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: A warmer coat, yes — but read on. William Tyndale wrote from his cell at Vilvoorde Castle, near Brussels: 'I suffer extremely from cold in the head… But above all I entreat… that he will kindly permit me to have my Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study.' Alice Pemberton: How does a scholar end up in that cell? Arthur Nightingale: By doing what English law treated as sedition: putting the Bible into English. Tyndale's was the first English scripture drawn straight from the Hebrew and the Greek, and the first to use the printing press. The penalty for heresy was death. Alice Pemberton: And the king? Arthur Nightingale: That's the strangest turn. Tyndale's book The Obedience of a Christian Man argued that a king, not the Pope, should rule his country's Church — and it reached Henry the Eighth, who found in it a reason to break with Rome. Then Tyndale opposed Henry's annulment, and made enemies of Church and Crown at once. Alice Pemberton: So who caught William Tyndale? Arthur Nightingale: A fellow Englishman. In Antwerp, Henry Phillips won his trust, walked him into an alley and handed him to the Emperor's guards. John Foxe recorded the end: 'He was tied to the stake, and then strangled first by the hangman, and afterwards consumed with fire in the town of Filford.' Arthur Nightingale: Even the chroniclers can't agree he died on this date. But Tyndale's phrasing was carried into the English Bibles that came after him. They burned the man. They kept the sentences. Alice Pemberton: In sixteen hundred, Florence staged the earliest opera that survives — and two composers fought over whose it was. To rule on it, our jurist, Judge Marion Calloway. Judge? Judge Marion Calloway: Fought over it, and left unusually good evidence. Jacopo Peri's Euridice premiered at the Palazzo Pitti the day after Maria de' Medici married Henry the Fourth of France — by proxy. Peri sang Orpheus himself. Alice Pemberton: By proxy? The groom stayed home? Judge Marion Calloway: He did, which rather spoils the parallel. Orpheus walked into Hell for his wife; Henry wouldn't come as far as Florence. Alice Pemberton: And the quarrel? Judge Marion Calloway: Giulio Caccini supplied singers from his circle, including his daughter Francesca, and some of his own music. When Caccini heard Peri meant to print Euridice with those pieces inside, he rushed out his own version on the same libretto and beat Peri into print. Alice Pemberton: Peri's defence? Judge Marion Calloway: His preface: every note was finished by the night of the performance. He calls it 'questa nuova maniera di canto' — this new manner of song — speech set to music. So Caccini wins on the date of print, Peri on the date of performance, and history sided with the stage. Alice Pemberton: Any further exhibits? Judge Marion Calloway: One. At those wedding festivities, the opera was a minor item beside a horse ballet. Nobody remembers the horses. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen twenty-seven, a film with about two minutes of talking ended an entire art form. From the archive, our sceptic in residence, Rufus McCrae, on The Jazz Singer. Rufus? Rufus McCrae: Two minutes, Alice — the rest was intertitles, like any silent picture. The Jazz Singer premiered at the Warners' Theatre in New York after sunset on the eve of Yom Kippur, which suited a film born as Samson Raphaelson's short story The Day of Atonement. Alice Pemberton: How did the sound reach the screen? Rufus McCrae: By hand. Warner's Vitaphone put it on giant phonograph records, and projectionists kept each disc in step with the reel. Heaven help the audience if one of them sneezed. Alice Pemberton: And the moment itself? Rufus McCrae: Al Jolson, as Jakie Rabinowitz, the cantor's son turned cabaret singer, says: 'Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet.' Doris Warner was there. She recalled that 'the audience became hysterical.' Alice Pemberton: Not a spotless triumph, though. Rufus McCrae: No — Jolson performs in blackface, and that stays on The Jazz Singer for good. And mark the plot: a son abandons his father's old art for a louder new one. Hollywood did the same, and the silent film, which never needed a word, was finished off by two minutes of them. Alice Pemberton: On this day the record serves a coup by invitation, a borrowed courtroom and a river crossed twice. At the table: military historian Sir Reginald Blackwood, field correspondent Emma Cartwright and old newspaperman Bradford Winslow. Emma — Beijing. Emma Cartwright: Nineteen seventy-six, a month after Mao died. Premier Hua Guofeng summoned the Gang of Four — Mao's widow Jiang Qing and three allies — to a Politburo meeting at Huairen Hall. The meeting was a pretext. Yao Wenyuan was lured with a draft of Mao's Selected Works; guards arrested them instead, and the Cultural Revolution was over. Bradford Winslow: Oldest trick in my trade, Emma — tell a man the proofs need his eye. Sir Reginald Blackwood: Nineteen twenty-three had a tidier handover. The Allies had occupied Istanbul since the end of the First World War; the protocol was signed aboard a British transport called the Arabic, and on this day the nationalists' Third Corps marched in. Within the month, Mustafa Kemal's movement declared the Republic of Turkey. Emma Cartwright: A whole city changing hands by paperwork. Sir Reginald Blackwood: Rarer than you'd think. Guadalcanal, nineteen forty-two: in September the Marines under Chesty Puller were thrown back at the Matanikau River. In October they crossed it, pushed the Japanese west and hobbled their preparations for the big attack on Henderson Field. Bradford Winslow: Same river, same commander, second go. Sir Reginald Blackwood: Which is most of war, Bradford. The first attempt shows you where the river is. Emma Cartwright: Back to nineteen seventy-six, off Barbados. Cubana Flight four-five-five was brought down by bombs hidden in Colgate toothpaste tubes. Everyone aboard died, among them the whole Cuban national fencing team — many of them teenagers, returning with every gold from the Caribbean championships. The captain radioed: 'We have an explosion aboard – we are descending immediately!' The fencers never grew old. Orlando Bosch, acquitted, did — in Miami. Bradford Winslow: Let me end somewhere gentler. In nineteen-oh-three the High Court of Australia sat for the first time, in a borrowed room — the Banco Court in Melbourne. On the bench sat Edmund Barton, Australia's first prime minister that same year. Sir Reginald Blackwood: From running the country to judging it. Bradford Winslow: And the court toured the state capitals for most of a century before Canberra gave it a home. Alice Pemberton: A coup by invitation, a city handed back, a court without a room — and a fencing team that never came home. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the sixth of October — where in seventeen sixty-two Britain beat Spain at the Battle of Manila and put the city under British occupation; where in one hundred and five BC, at Arausio, the Cimbrian War gave the Roman Republic proof that its legions could be broken; and, more recently, where in nineteen seventy-nine John Paul the Second became the first pope ever to visit the White House. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: They skipped a pope, Mortimer. In eight ninety-one, the clergy and people of Rome elected Formosus — unanimously, by one account. Mortimer Finch: An orderly election. Riveting. Humphrey Thwaite: Orderly until a successor had him dug up and put on trial in the Cadaver Synod. Dead men make poor defendants. Mortimer Finch: And no pope has dared take the name Formosus since. Can't think why.