In 1922, a grand Paris concert hall filled with France's cultural elite to honor Gabriel Fauré with a national musical tribute, yet the composer sat beside the president of the republic unable to hear a single note. This episode traces how a boy from a cultured but non-musical family in the south of France, who taught himself on a school chapel harmonium, was discovered by an elderly blind woman and sent to the austere Niedermeyer School, where rigorous drilling in ancient church modes and counterpoint gave him the exact tools he would later use to break the rules of the conservative French establishment.

The story follows Fauré's disastrous first job as a church organist in Brittany, his combat service in the Franco-Prussian War and the trauma of the Paris Commune, decades of church work and hated piano lessons to pay the rent, a mismatche ...