In January 2014, thousands stood in silence outside La Scala while Daniel Barenboim conducted Beethoven's funeral march to an empty hall, mourning Claudio Abbado. Born in Milan in 1933 into a musical family, Abbado grew up under Nazi occupation, where his mother was imprisoned for harboring a Jewish child and his own Viva Bartok graffiti at age eleven triggered a Gestapo hunt. This episode traces how those early encounters with totalitarianism shaped his rejection of the dictatorial podium style he saw in Toscanini.

We follow Abbado from Leonard Bernstein telling him at fifteen that he had the eye of a conductor, to his Vienna years secretly watching Karajan rehearse alongside Zubin Mehta, his Koussevitzky competition win, and his return to La Scala as music director in 1972. We cover his cheap performances for factory workers and students, ...