When Jean-Philippe Rameau died in Paris in 1764, he owned one pair of shoes, threadbare clothes, and a dilapidated harpsichord. Hidden in his apartment was a bag holding 1,691 gold coins. This deep dive uses that paradox to open the life of a secretive, irritable French composer who spent his twenties and thirties as a traveling violinist and provincial organist before publishing his Treatise on Harmony in 1722 at nearly 40.

The episode explains how his concept of the fundamental bass proved that inverted chords share the same root and grounded harmony in the physics of the overtone series, earning him the title of the Isaac Newton of music. It then follows his operatic debut with Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 at nearly 50, the pamphlet war between Lullistes and Ramistes, his 22 years in the household of the financier La Pouplinière, and his  ...