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 behind the piano, to his first instrument built from a hollowed-out gourd, and to the day in 1890 when he found a crumpled stack of Bach's six cello suites in a secondhand shop near the Barcelona harbor.

Casals practiced those dismissed exercises every day for 13 years before performing them in public, inventing new bowing and fingering techniques along the way. We trace his rise through royal patronage, Carnegie Hall, the White House and a legendary tr ...