Born in Halle in 1685 to a 63-year-old barber-surgeon who banned instruments from the house, George Frideric Handel became the composer whose music has been played at every British coronation since 1727. This episode traces his path from a boy sneaking up to a hidden keyboard in the attic, to the Duke of Weissenfels overriding his father's plan for a law career, to rigorous training under Zachow that meant copying the scores of German, French and Italian masters until he had built a vast internal vocabulary of styles.

From there the story moves through a near-fatal 1704 duel with Johann Mattheson in Hamburg, where a coat button deflected the blade, an Italian sabbatical in which a papal ban on staged opera pushed him into dramatic sacred cantatas for cardinals, and the founding of the Royal Academy of Music in London in 1719. The episode lo ...