Alice Pemberton: In two thousand and four, fire climbs Caracas’s Parque Central East Tower and burns through its upper floors. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen seventy-seven, the hijacked Lufthansa Flight one-eighty-one lands in Mogadishu, and its remaining hostages will be rescued. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen forty, the body of the Communist propagandist Willi Münzenberg is found in southern France. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the seventeenth of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on a British army piling its muskets beside the Hudson; Arthur Nightingale at a deathbed on the Place Vendôme; Vivian Hale on a Caravaggio that left by an unbarred window; Marion Calloway, Rufus McCrae and Doc Sullivan on a fifteen-year-old's wedding present; and a Round Table wading through a river of beer. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: On this day in seventeen seventy-seven, a British general signed away an entire army beside the Hudson, and lost the argument in Paris. For the front page, our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Paris didn't know it yet, Alice, but Saratoga had settled it. John Burgoyne's army was trapped, and he signed the Articles of Convention with the American general Horatio Gates. On the seventeenth his troops marched out to the river where the old fort stood. They piled their arms by word of command from their own officers. Alice Pemberton: Their own officers. So even surrender had manners? Professor Edmund Cavendish: It was practically a contract. They marched out 'with the honours of war.' Article Two promised 'a free passage to be granted to the army under Lieutenant-general Burgoyne to Great Britain, on condition of not serving again in North America during the present contest.' Gentlemen's terms for a gentleman's defeat. Alice Pemberton: So who was really listening? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Versailles. Saratoga convinced France that an independent United States was a real possibility rather than a gamble. Within months came a commercial agreement, then a Treaty of Alliance, and Spain came after. A surrender on a riverbank in New York turned a colonial rebellion into a war against France and Spain. That was a war Britain could not win. Alice Pemberton: Shortly after midnight on this day in eighteen forty-nine, a doctor in Paris asked a dying composer whether he was suffering. For the biographical sketch, our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: And Frédéric Chopin gave him one word: 'No longer.' He was thirty-nine, in an apartment on the Place Vendôme that his pupil Jane Stirling paid for. His sister Ludwika was at his side. Before dawn, he was gone. Alice Pemberton: Then take us to the boy he was. Arthur Nightingale: A child prodigy, born in Żelazowa Wola, west of Warsaw. He wrote his early works in Warsaw. At twenty he left Poland, less than a month before the November Uprising broke out. Poland stayed in his music. Paris kept the man. Alice Pemberton: And Paris made Chopin a star? Arthur Nightingale: A strange kind of star. In Paris he gave only about thirty public performances; he preferred the intimacy of the salon. He lived by teaching and selling his compositions. And he invented an entire form, the instrumental ballade. Alice Pemberton: What did it cost him? Arthur Nightingale: His health. He was ill most of his life. There was a long, troubled love with the novelist George Sand, and an unhappy stay on Mallorca that became one of his most productive. And at the very end, one fear, spoken aloud: 'Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won't be buried alive.' Alice Pemberton: So what did Chopin leave behind? Arthur Nightingale: The Polish parliament founded an institute in Fryderyk Chopin's name, and it runs a competition devoted to nothing but his music. A man who barely played in public now has the whole world queuing to play him. Alice Pemberton: On this day in nineteen sixty-nine, a Caravaggio altarpiece taller than a doorway left a Palermo church through a side window nobody had barred. For the inflection point, our economist, Vivian Hale. Vivian? Vivian Hale: That unbarred window is the whole hinge. Caravaggio's Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence had hung above the altar of the Oratory of Saint Lawrence for centuries. There was no alarm, no camera, no guard. Two thieves climbed in and cut the canvas from its frame with a razor. They rolled it up, probably in the oratory's own carpet, and left the empty frame behind. Alice Pemberton: How long before anyone noticed? Vivian Hale: Here's the number: almost a week. The congregation last saw it at Sunday mass. The caretakers, the Gelfo sisters, found the empty frame the following Saturday morning. A masterpiece whose entire security system was two caretakers preparing for mass. Alice Pemberton: And the trail? Vivian Hale: A police report on the premises disappeared. Then, in twenty nineteen, a video interview with the parish priest, Benedetto Rocco, came out. He said the painting had been kept by a powerful mafia boss, who sliced off a piece of the canvas to bargain with the Church. Alice Pemberton: So where is the Nativity now? Vivian Hale: Nobody can tell you. Half a century after the theft, the Guardian was still calling it a mystery. One window left unbarred, and the last thing anyone saw of Caravaggio's Nativity is an empty frame above an altar. Alice Pemberton: On this day in seventeen seventy-one, fifteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart premiered a royal wedding present in Milan. A panel for the long echo: Judge Marion Calloway, our jurist; Rufus McCrae, our sceptic; Doc Sullivan, science and medicine. Marion? Judge Marion Calloway: A wedding present with a paper trail, Alice. Ascanio in Alba was commissioned by the Empress Maria Theresa for her son Archduke Ferdinand's marriage to Maria Beatrice d'Este. The governor of Milan, Count Firmian, drafted letters backing the boy months in advance. It opened two days after the wedding. A state contract, delivered on time. Rufus McCrae: And the libretto was by Giuseppe Parini, a serious poet, who handed him a plot of heroic thinness. Venus tells her son Ascanio to court his bride in disguise, to test her virtue. She passes. Everybody sings. Two parts of a goddess checking references. Alice Pemberton: Doc, where's the person in all this pageantry? Doc Sullivan: He's fifteen years old. Mozart scored it for a full orchestra, trumpets and timpani included. His father Leopold's letters home are how we know the story at all. A teenager delivering an imperial commission while his dad kept the paperwork. Alice Pemberton: So where does it echo, Rufus? Rufus McCrae: In the irony. The wedding was the event, and the music was the party favour. When La Scala marked Mozart's two hundred and fiftieth birthday in two thousand and six, it was the party favour they put on. Alice Pemberton: Commissioned for a marriage, kept for the boy. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: On this day in eighteen fourteen, a vat of porter burst in London and a wave of beer flattened a brewery wall. At the Round Table: our human-interest man, Old Jim Calhoun; our markets man, Joe Marchetti; and our field correspondent, Emma Cartwright. Jim, the beer. Old Jim Calhoun: The beer came out of Meux's Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road. An iron hoop slipped off a vat, and the clerk was told 'that no harm whatever would ensue.' An hour later it burst, and the porter poured into the St Giles rookery. Emma Cartwright: Comedy, right up until the casualty list. Old Jim Calhoun: Eight dead. Five of them were mourners at an Irish family's wake for a little boy. The coroner's verdict: 'casually, accidentally and by misfortune.' Joe Marchetti: And the brewery survived because the excise refunded the duty on the lost beer. The taxman bailed out the flood. Speaking of the taxman: on this day in nineteen thirty-one, Al Capone was convicted of income-tax evasion. Judge James Wilkerson had already thrown out his plea deal: 'it is utterly impossible to bargain with a Federal Court.' Old Jim Calhoun: A massacre in broad daylight couldn't put him away. His taxes did. Eleven years. Emma Cartwright: My trade starts here. On this day in nineteen-oh-seven, Marconi opened the first commercial wireless service across the Atlantic, Ireland to Nova Scotia. No ceremony, just company men and reporters. His verdict: 'I am perfectly satisfied with the results of today's work.' Joe Marchetti: And he'd already named his rivals. Open for business, he said, 'the same as cable companies.' Emma Cartwright: On this day in nineteen fifty-six, the Queen pulled a lever at Calder Hall in Cumberland, the world's first nuclear station to sell its power to a public grid. Her words: 'we are present at the making of history.' Old Jim Calhoun: And the clean-up at that site is planned to run until twenty-one twenty. Joe Marchetti: You'll want that lever when the oil stops. On this day in nineteen seventy-three, the Arab oil producers announced cuts against countries backing Israel in the Yom Kippur War. By the time the embargo lifted, oil cost nearly four times as much. Emma Cartwright: Suddenly a lever in Cumberland looked like foreign policy. Alice Pemberton: Beer, wireless, taxes, atoms and oil: a thread none of us was looking for. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the seventeenth of October — where in nineteen sixty-six the Twenty-Third Street Fire in New York killed twelve firefighters in a single blaze; where in sixteen sixty the executions of the men who signed King Charles the First's death warrant came to an end, the men who killed a king paying with their own lives; and, more recently, where in two thousand a rail crash at Hatfield slowed trains across Britain and eventually brought down Railtrack. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: What they didn't tell you: in ten ninety-one a tornado struck the heart of London. More than six hundred houses smashed, the roof torn off St Mary-le-Bow, two men killed. Mortimer Finch: A tornado. In London. Next you'll tell me it rained. Humphrey Thwaite: Rafters twenty-six feet long, hammered into the ground. Only the tips showed. William of Malmesbury called it 'a great spectacle for those watching from afar.' Mortimer Finch: Watching from afar. Sensible chap. Humphrey Thwaite: He was writing decades later, Mortimer. You can't get much further.