Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote the 1812 Overture in six weeks and told his patron it had no artistic merit, yet it remains the sound of triumphant celebration. This episode moves past that irony to trace how a sensitive child born in the ironworks town of Votkinsk in 1840, fluent in French and German by six, was sent 800 miles away to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence and lost his mother to cholera at 14. His first serious composition was a waltz in her memory, establishing a lifelong link between grief and creation.

We follow his escape from the Ministry of Justice into the new St. Petersburg Conservatory and the cultural battle between Anton Rubinstein's Western academics and the nationalist Five led by Balakirev. The conversation explains the accumulation technique he used to build cyclical Russian melodies into explosive climaxes, ex ...