In 1908, a destitute 21-year-old Arthur Rubinstein, dodging creditors in a bleak Berlin hotel room, attempted to end his own life. The mechanism failed, and he described feeling instantly reborn with an unconditional love for life that carried him through eight more decades of performing. This episode traces how a prodigy with absolute pitch at age two, born in Poland in 1887 and trained in Berlin by Karl Heinrich Barth in a lineage running back through Liszt and Czerny to Beethoven, crashed so hard after a lukewarm 1906 American debut.

We explore the decades he spent coasting on a photographic and aural memory so powerful he could learn César Franck's Symphonic Variations by reading the score on a train, and the 1934 crisis, at age 47, when fear that his children would see him as a fraud drove him to rebuild his technique from scratch at n ...