In 1821, an elderly Goethe listened to a twelve-year-old pianist and declared that the boy made the young Mozart he had once heard sound like a prattling child. This episode explores Felix Mendelssohn's pressure-cooker upbringing: a family that fled Hamburg in disguise after his banker father undermined Napoleon's blockade, a Berlin salon where the Humboldt brothers and Europe's intellectuals came to dinner, a brilliant sister Fanny forbidden from a public career whose songs were published under Felix's name, a secret baptism at age seven, and a father who demanded the family erase the Mendelssohn name in favor of Bartholdy.

The conversation follows his teenage explosion of creativity, from thirteen string symphonies written for a private home orchestra to the Octet at sixteen and the Midsummer Night's Dream overture at seventeen, then his  ...