In 1947, a 25-year-old undocumented immigrant stepped off a train in Paris with half his face scarred, his left eye missing, and a death sentence waiting in Greece. This episode explores how Iannis Xenakis, born in 1922 in Brăila, Romania, to a wealthy Greek family, lost his pianist mother to measles at age five, absorbed Mozart, Homer, folk chant and physics at boarding school on Spetses, and then joined the Greek resistance during the Axis occupation. Fighting British tanks in the streets of Athens in December 1944, he was struck by shrapnel from a tank shell that shattered his cheek and palate, yet he survived to finish his civil engineering degree before fleeing on a fake passport.

The conversation follows his years as an engineer in Le Corbusier's studio, where he designed the hyperbolic-paraboloid Philips Pavilion for the 1958 Brussel ...