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Anton Webern's scores look more like calculus than music, and after World War II a generation of avant-garde composers crowned him the prophet of pure, emotionless sound. This episode argues they missed the point entirely. Born in Vienna in 1883 and raised at his family's Preglhof estate in Carinthia, Webern hiked the Alps, studied the alpine paintings of Giovanni Segantini, and wrote in his diary...

When Giuseppe Verdi died in 1901, an estimated 300,000 people filled the streets of Milan led by an 820-person choir, mourning a man who claimed he only wanted to be left alone to inspect his cornfields. This episode dismantles the peasant myth Verdi cultivated for the press: born in 1813 to an innkeeper and a spinner who bought him a spinet and paid for tutoring, he was rejected by the Milan Cons...

One of the most swinging American jazz standards of the mid-century, Mack the Knife, was written by a classically trained German Jewish refugee fleeing the Nazis. This episode traces Kurt Weill from his birth in Dessau in 1900 as the son of a cantor, through his studies at the Berlin Hochschule with Engelbert Humperdinck, and into the post-war collapse that forced him to drop out and play piano in...

Johann Sebastian Bach walked roughly 280 miles on foot to hear Dieterich Buxtehude play, overstayed a four-week leave by months, and was later jailed for nearly a month for "too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal." This episode strips away the marble-bust image to find the orphan from Eisenach who lost both parents by age ten, copied his brother's locked-away manuscripts by moonlight fo...

In 1908, a destitute 21-year-old Arthur Rubinstein, dodging creditors in a bleak Berlin hotel room, attempted to end his own life. The mechanism failed, and he described feeling instantly reborn with an unconditional love for life that carried him through eight more decades of performing. This episode traces how a prodigy with absolute pitch at age two, born in Poland in 1887 and trained in Berlin...

Glenn Gould was once arrested on a Florida park bench for wearing a heavy winter overcoat, beanie, and mittens in sweltering heat. Born in Toronto in 1932, he hummed instead of crying as a baby, had perfect pitch by three, and studied the decay of a single piano note rather than banging the keys. After a back injury at age ten, his father sawed down a folding chair to a 14-inch height, and Gould u...

Georg Philipp Telemann's family forbade him from making music, so he secretly wrote an entire opera by age twelve and taught himself the flute, oboe, violin, recorder, double bass, and viola da gamba. Sent to Leipzig in 1701 to study law, he was quickly running the municipal opera house and poaching university students from rival cantor Johann Kuhnau. This episode follows his path through Sorau, E...

Vladimir Horowitz was hailed as one of the greatest pianists who ever lived, yet he sometimes had to be physically pushed onto the stage by his management. Born in Kiev in 1903, he dreamed of being a composer until the Russian Revolution wiped out his family's wealth and forced him to tour the Soviet Union, playing two-hour recitals for payment in bread, butter, and chocolate. In 1925 he left for...

Gaetano Donizetti was born in 1797 in a cramped basement in Bergamo, the son of a pawn shop caretaker with no musical background. His one stroke of luck was Simon Mayr, a German composer who ran a charity music school and, when the boy's changing voice threatened to get him expelled, wrote a school play casting him as "the little composer" to prove his talent went beyond singing. This episode foll...

In 1713, the Italian violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini claimed he dreamed of making a pact with the devil, handed over his violin, and heard a sonata of such impossible beauty that he woke gasping for air. He grabbed his instrument and tried to capture what he had heard, producing the Violin Sonata in G minor now known as the Devil's Trill. Yet Tartini considered his masterpiece a pale shado...

Camille Saint-Saëns showed perfect pitch before age three, mastered Latin, Greek, mathematics, and astronomy as a schoolboy, and was trained on a mechanical piano method that produced a crystalline, typewriter-like technique. Yet he failed the Prix de Rome twice, with judges including Berlioz mistaking his flawless polish for a lack of inner fire. This episode follows his double life as organist a...

Claude Debussy began composing his Suite Bergamasque around 1890 at age 28, then hid it away for fifteen years, convinced it was immature and worried it would dilute his reputation as an avant-garde innovator. When a publisher finally persuaded him to release it in 1905, he heavily revised the score and renamed two movements, turning the generic "Promenade Sentimentale" into the now-legendary "Cla...

In 1935, a 14-year-old Astor Piazzolla was invited to tour with tango superstar Carlos Gardel, and his strict father said no. Gardel's plane then crashed, killing everyone on board. Piazzolla later joked that without that grounding he would be playing the harp in heaven instead of the bandoneon on earth. This episode traces the turbulent life of the Argentine composer whose musical awakening actua...

Imagine writing the definitive works you will be remembered for in your mid-60s, decades after an aggressive parent tried and failed to manufacture you into a child superstar. That is the story of Cesar Franck. This episode follows how his father Nicolas-Joseph, a bank clerk with tunnel vision, pushed him from the Liege conservatory to performances for the king and into the Paris Conservatoire, al...

The frantic brass-heavy jazz that plays whenever a cartoon conveyor belt spins out of control was composed by Raymond Scott, who never wrote a single note for animation. This episode uncovers the double life of the man born Harry Warnow in Brooklyn, a Juilliard-trained pianist who picked a new name to avoid accusations of nepotism under his bandleader brother at CBS, formed the six-member Raymond...

Picture a wealthy Manhattan insurance executive of the 1910s buried in mortality tables, then overlay one of the most radical avant-garde composers of the century, writing music the world would lack the vocabulary to understand for another 50 years. Both are Charles Ives, born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874. This episode traces how his father George, a Civil War bandleader with a New England refo...

In April 1914, an Italian theater audience expecting an evening of orchestral music instead saw a stage crowded with brightly colored wooden boxes fitted with giant metal megaphones. When performers began cranking levers and the hall filled with mechanical howling and scraping, the crowd tore up velvet seats and attacked the musicians. This episode explores the man behind that riot, Luigi Russolo,...

An American founding father's diary describes the pinnacle of European talent: a man who could shoot a coin out of the air, was unmatched with a sword, an expert horseman and a genius on the violin. That man was Joseph Boulogne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, born in Guadeloupe in 1745 to a wealthy white plantation owner and Nanon, an enslaved Senegalese teenager in his household. This episode ch...

In 1687, conducting a grand Te Deum to celebrate Louis XIV's recovery from surgery, Jean-Baptiste Lully brought his heavy wooden staff down on his own toe. Gangrene set in, doctors told him the foot had to come off, and he refused, choosing death at 54 over losing the dancer's body that had launched his career. This episode traces the rags-to-riches life of Giovanni Battista Lulli, a miller's son...

In a Buenos Aires kindergarten in the mid-1940s, a five-year-old boy told a three-year-old girl she could not play the piano. She walked to the classroom instrument and played a piece flawlessly by ear. This episode follows that girl, Martha Argerich, born in 1941, from a legendary career launched by a playground dare through the pressure cooker of prodigy training under Vincenzo Scaramuzza, who t...

Celebrated as the father of Czech music, Bedrich Smetana did not speak proper Czech until his late 30s and wrote his most famous nationalist masterpieces while completely deaf. This episode explores how a brewer's son born in Habsburg-ruled Bohemia in 1824, raised speaking German because Czech was the language of peasants, fought on the barricades of the 1848 uprising in Prague, endured the loss o...

The man who composed some of the most mathematically complex music in history never learned to multiply or divide. To work out 16 times 7, Beethoven would write the number seven down 16 times and add up the column. This episode uses that detail as a lens on a life defined by relentless struggle and agonizing workarounds, moving past the scowling marble bust to the messy, deeply human story of a bo...

In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the hand signs used to communicate with the alien mothership are credited to a Hungarian composer. The film gets that detail wrong, but the mistake points to a real figure who transformed how human beings learn music. This episode explores the life of Zoltan Kodaly, born in 1882 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a composer, ethnomusicologist, linguist and educa...

On August 9, 1942, the Soviet Army fired 3,000 artillery shells at the German lines around Leningrad in an operation code-named Squall. The objective was not to gain ground but to buy silence, so that a group of starving musicians could perform Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony and broadcast it across a decimated city and toward the German trenches. This episode explores how that music came t...

What if one of the most famously guarded pieces of music in history was never really locked in a vault, and the soaring high note that gives listeners goosebumps today was the product of a documented clerical error? This episode traces the strange biography of Gregorio Allegri's Miserere mei Deus, composed in the 1630s for the candle-extinguishing Tenebrae services in the Sistine Chapel, drawing o...