San Francisco’s larger-than-life music historian / media personality, Robert Greenberg, is now featured prominently on “TV With Big Personality Online, Anytime, Anywhere” Ora TV. Smiling on the home page, right beneath “Larry King Live,” “BeerGeeks,” “The Real Girl’s Kitchen,” William Shatner’s “Brown Bag Wine Tasting,” and Jesse Ventura’s “Off the Grid,” Greenberg’s photo leads to a rather unhinged interview with Shatner. Speaking over a glass of wine, the “recovered music professor” makes his case for the first of what may become an ongoing series of punchy, flashily illustrated short programs titled Scandalous Overtures.
As it turns out, the manager of the online network, which was co-founded by Larry King and 2013 Forbes Richest Man in the World media mogul Carlos Slim, has been following Greenberg’s The Great Courses lectures for years, and follows Greenberg’s Facebook fan page.
“He read a blog on Mozart’s death that I posted on December 6, 2013, the anniversary of his death, and he contacted me,” Greenberg told SFCV. “He wanted a TV series in which each episode involved some controversy, some plot against a composer, or a secret. I wrote 15 of them, which I recorded in a studio in March. It took about nine months for them to produce them, and they premiered this December.” Now they’ve optioned for three more sets of 15.”
One look at the latest show, Ludwig Van Beethoven: Beethoven’s Death Wish, will explain why Greenberg readily admits to the salacious content of his stories. “Everything has to be within four inches of the belt,” he says. “Within eight minutes, I have to humanize a person and tell you something that’s fun to have heard at the same time. And, unlike my lectures where I can rely on musical examples, here I’m telling a story that has to have a beginning middle and end, as well as a backstory, in eight minutes.”
It will also explain why Greenberg is going all out, as it were. The future of the series, as with virtually all internet ventures, depends upon how many hits it gets, and how much advertising revenue it generates. You may loathe inescapable ads for action movies featuring half-clothed “heroes” waving swords this way and that, but that’s what it takes to keep cutting edge shows such as Greenberg’s on the virtual air. Check out the promo for his show on Ora TV’s WTFark, a program aimed at a decidedly young, male demographic. No more need be said … than Greenberg will say every week, as the action-packed Classical Soap Opera known as Scandalous Overtures unfolds.