In May 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, an evening of ballet devolved into fistfights, screaming and whistles so loud the dancers could not hear the orchestra. This episode explores how Igor Stravinsky, born in 1882 near St Petersburg to an opera-singing father, hated scales, devoured his father's vocal scores by sight-reading, endured law school, and found his mentor in Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who told him to avoid the conservatory at all costs. It follows his secret marriage to his first cousin, his discovery by impresario Sergei Diaghilev, the overnight success of The Firebird and Petrushka, and the polytonality and shifting time signatures that made The Rite of Spring an existential sonic assault.

The conversation then traces how World War I and the Russian Revolution trapped him in Switzerland with a sick wife, four children an ...