In May 1809, with Napoleon's cannons shaking Vienna, a French cavalry officer knocked on the door of a frail 77-year-old man to sing him one of his own arias. This episode traces how Joseph Haydn got there: born in 1732 to a wheelwright and a cook in the village of Rohrau, sent away at six, recruited as a choirboy at St. Stephen's Cathedral at seven, and thrown onto the streets at seventeen after his voice broke and a pigtail prank earned him a caning.

The hosts follow Haydn's self-taught study of counterpoint and C.P.E. Bach in a freezing attic, his loveless marriage to Maria Anna, and decades in a servant's uniform at the remote Esterhaza palace, where isolation became a musical laboratory. They cover the 1779 contract that let him sell to outside publishers, the London tours arranged by Johann Peter Salomon, the petty rivalry with Ignaz  ...