A two-year-old in early 1980s Shenyang watches a tuxedoed cartoon cat pound out Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in the Tom and Jerry short The Cat Concerto, and a lifelong obsession with the piano begins. This episode explores how Lang Lang's parents, musicians whose ambitions were derailed when they were sent to rural rice farms during the Cultural Revolution, projected their deferred dreams onto their only child, who started lessons at three and won a local competition at five. It confronts the darkest chapter of his autobiography: at nine, after a Beijing tutor dismissed him for a supposed lack of talent, his father told him he should not live and ordered him to jump from their eleventh-floor balcony.

The conversation follows how a state-school teacher rescued his love of music by simply asking him to play the second movement of Mozart' ...