Before Andrés Segovia, the classical guitar was a quiet parlor novelty. By the time he died in Madrid at 94, it was a centerpiece of the world's grandest concert halls, and he was a Marquis with an asteroid named after him. This episode follows the self-taught Spanish rebel whose family wanted him to be a lawyer, whose first violin lessons were a joyless disaster, and who rejected the flamenco all around him in Granada to hunt down classical works by Sor and Tárrega.

We break down the physics of his heretical technique, plucking with fingernails near the bridge to fill 3,000-seat halls, and the three-pronged strategy he used to build a repertoire from scratch: transcribing Bach's Chaconne, editing and reviving older guitar composers, and commissioning new works from Ponce, Villa-Lobos, and Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Then we confront the paradox o ...