Johann Sebastian Bach walked roughly 280 miles on foot to hear Dieterich Buxtehude play, overstayed a four-week leave by months, and was later jailed for nearly a month for "too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal." This episode strips away the marble-bust image to find the orphan from Eisenach who lost both parents by age ten, copied his brother's locked-away manuscripts by moonlight for six months, and reverse-engineered Vivaldi's concertos in Weimar to build his own musical language.

We follow him to Cöthen, where Prince Leopold's Calvinist court freed him to write the Brandenburg Concertos and cello suites, and where he returned from a trip to find his wife Maria Barbara already dead and buried. We cover his twenty children, ten of whom survived, the grueling Leipzig years producing a new cantata nearly every week while fighti ...