The invisible hand behind the lump in your throat during Nomadland and The Father belongs to Ludovico Einaudi, one of the most streamed classical artists on the planet and a composer the classical establishment routinely dismisses. This episode explores his birth in Turin in 1955 into Italy's intellectual and political elite: a grandfather, Luigi Einaudi, who served as president of Italy from 1948 to 1955, a father, Giulio Einaudi, who published Italo Calvino and Primo Levi, and a mother, Renata, whose piano playing and whose own father, conductor Waldo Aldrovandi, gave him an escape route into music. His first teenage compositions were written not on a Steinway but on an acoustic folk guitar.

The conversation follows his composition diploma from the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan in 1982 and his Tanglewood studies under Luciano Berio, who an ...