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How does a man who died in 1887 win a Tony Award in 1954, and how did that same man co-discover a chemical reaction still taught in universities today? This episode unpacks the divided life of Alexander Borodin, born illegitimate in St. Petersburg in 1833 to a 62-year-old Georgian nobleman and registered as the legal son of one of his father's own serfs. Educated at home by private tutors because...

When an 80-year-old Pablo Casals married a 20-year-old student and people raised concerns about the age gap, he deadpanned that if she dies, she dies. That dry defiance runs through the entire life of the man widely called the greatest cellist who ever lived. This episode follows Casals from his birth in El Vendrell, Catalonia in 1876, where his organist father made him identify notes hidden behin...

In August 1991, with tanks rolling through Moscow, world-famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich bought a plane ticket to Japan with a deliberate layover in the Soviet capital, talked his way past airport security without a visa, and joined Boris Yeltsin in the streets to oppose the military coup. This episode traces how a musical prodigy born in Baku in 1927 became one of the greatest cellists in hi...

When the King of Spain ordered Luigi Boccherini to change a passage he disliked, the composer went home and doubled it, then played it again and was fired on the spot. This episode explores the life behind that act of defiance, from a childhood in Lucca, Italy, where his musician father began cello lessons at age five, through teenage years touring to Rome and Vienna's Burgtheater. On the road he...

In 1737 the biggest performer on the planet walked away from packed London theaters at 32 and spent the next nine years singing the same four arias every night to a single depressed king. This episode tells the story of Carlo Broschi, known as Farinelli, born in Apulia in 1705 and castrated after his father's death in 1717 plunged the family into poverty, with a fall from a horse as the cover stor...

In 18th-century Italian theaters, audiences fainted and wept at voices so pure they were called angelic, yet those voices were manufactured through a brutal, often fatal operation on boys aged eight to ten. This episode examines the castrati: why impoverished families gambled a son's body on the chance of stardom, how surgeries were performed with opium, ice baths, milk baths or pressure on the ca...

On July 7, 1990, at the ancient Baths of Caracalla in Rome on the eve of the FIFA World Cup final, Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras stood shoulder to shoulder and accidentally broke the music industry. This episode traces how a concert conceived by producers Mario Dradi, Elmar Kruse and Herbert Chappell to welcome Carreras back from leukemia treatment and raise funds for his fo...

Pete Townshend of The Who has credited a 17th-century composer in a powdered wig as the structural blueprint for his stadium anthems. This episode strips away the period-drama stereotype to find the gritty, relentless theater musician behind Henry Purcell. Born in Westminster around September 1659, just as Charles II's Restoration reopened theaters and cathedrals starved of music under Puritan rul...

Modest Mussorgsky could trace his bloodline to the Rurik dynasty, yet he signed letters to friends as the garbage-dweller, a joke rooted in the Russian word for rubbish buried inside his family name. This episode follows a piano prodigy born into wealth in 1839, performing Liszt for family audiences at nine, who was shipped to the Cadet School of the Guards at 13, where a director took pride in se...

The swirling synthesizer intro to The Who's Baba O'Riley is a direct tribute to Terry Riley, the American composer born in Colfax, California in 1935 who helped found musical minimalism. This episode traces how a student of rigorous European composition at San Francisco State, the San Francisco Conservatory and UC Berkeley was simultaneously absorbing John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Bill Evans and...

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote the 1812 Overture in six weeks and told his patron it had no artistic merit, yet it remains the sound of triumphant celebration. This episode moves past that irony to trace how a sensitive child born in the ironworks town of Votkinsk in 1840, fluent in French and German by six, was sent 800 miles away to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence and lost his mother to cho...

During the Cultural Revolution, Tan Dun planted rice on the Huangjin Commune and was forbidden to study music. Decades later he won an Academy Award, wrote for the Metropolitan Opera, and conducted the world's leading orchestras. This episode traces that journey from a childhood in Changsha listening to village shamans make music with water, rocks and ceramic bowls, through a secret commune ensemb...

In his later years Sviatoslav Richter performed in near-total darkness, with only a small reading lamp clipped to the score, so audiences would focus on the music rather than the man. This episode traces how a largely self-taught pianist from Odessa, sight-reading for the local opera by age 15, survived the Soviet regime by treating himself as a mirror for the composer. We cover the 1941 execution...

In September 1963, John Cage charged five dollars to enter a Manhattan theater and refunded five cents for every 20 minutes an audience member stayed. The music was Vexations, a single page written by Erik Satie in Paris around 1893 with a note suggesting it be played 840 times in a row. This episode unpacks the trap Satie set on that page: enharmonic spellings that stall the reader's brain, missi...

The most explosive piece of music of the 20th century was written in a tiny eight-by-eight-foot room in Clarens, Switzerland, on a heavily muted upright piano. This episode follows Igor Stravinsky from a musical household in St. Petersburg and a law degree begun in 1901 through his mentorship under Rimsky-Korsakov, his discovery by impresario Sergei Diaghilev after the 1909 performance of Firework...

Sofia Gubaidulina survived a strangling attempt in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building in 1973, an attack her peers suspected came from the KGB, all because of the kind of music she wrote. Born in 1931 in the Tatar region to a Volga Tatar father and a mother of Polish Jewish descent, she connected music to God at age five and immediately understood she had to hide that feeling. This epis...

Heitor Villa-Lobos told Paris salons he had escaped from cannibals in the Amazon, and whether or not the story was true, it was brilliant anti-conservatory marketing. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1887 during a period of massive social upheaval, he learned music by secretly listening to his father's musical evenings, taught himself cello, clarinet and guitar, and after his father's death in 1899 suppo...

A world-famous composer stands on a freezing landing outside his apartment in the dead of night, suitcase packed, waiting for the secret police so his family will not be woken by the arrest. That image opens this deep dive into Dmitri Shostakovich, the child prodigy whose conservatory graduation piece, his First Symphony, made him internationally famous at 19. We follow his rise, his failed bid at...

Seiji Ozawa trained his whole childhood to be a concert pianist until a teenage rugby game in 1950 broke two of his fingers and ended that dream in an instant. This episode traces how his teacher Hideo Saito took him to hear Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto, where the injured student stopped watching the keyboard and started watching the conductor. From there, Ozawa hustled his way to Europe with...

Alexander Scriabin believed his masterpiece, a seven-day ritual in a temple in the Himalayan foothills called the Mysterium, would dissolve the physical universe in a wave of cosmic bliss. He died in 1915 at 43 from sepsis that began as a pimple on his upper lip. This deep dive traces how a frail, coddled boy born in Moscow in 1871, whose pianist mother died of tuberculosis, arrived at that vision...

Franz Schubert stood about five feet tall, slept on friends' couches, was nicknamed Schwammerl, and died at 31 having written more than 1,500 works, including over 600 songs. This deep dive follows him from a Vienna household where only five of 14 children survived, through the Imperial Seminary under Salieri, to an 1815 marriage consent law that barred him from marrying the soprano Therese Grob b...

In 1919 a nine-year-old wrote his mother a solemn letter confessing that he was not meant to be an athlete but a composer, and asking her to stop making him play football. This deep dive follows Samuel Barber from a West Chester, Pennsylvania household with a physician father, a pianist mother, and an aunt, Louise Homer, who was a leading contralto at the Metropolitan Opera, to the Curtis Institut...

In 1968 a teenage Ryuichi Sakamoto helped barricade his high school principal's office during a student protest. The same person went on to study ethnomusicology and early synthesizers at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, form Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978, act opposite David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and become the first Japanese composer to win an Academy Award...

As a boy, Robert Schumann could sit at the piano, look at a friend, and improvise a portrait so accurate that the room burst out laughing. This deep dive follows the composer from his father August's bookshop in Zwickau, filled with translations of Byron, Scott, and Cervantes, through years of law school he barely attended, to the mysterious paralysis of his right hand that ended his hopes of beco...

A composer fleeing debts by ship in the night, a wanted radical running from treason charges after a failed uprising, and the architect of an entirely new form of music drama were all the same man. This deep dive traces Richard Wagner from a Leipzig childhood spent backstage with his stepfather, the actor Ludwig Geyer, through bankruptcy in Magdeburg, seized passports in Riga, poverty in Paris, an...