In 1687, conducting a grand Te Deum to celebrate Louis XIV's recovery from surgery, Jean-Baptiste Lully brought his heavy wooden staff down on his own toe. Gangrene set in, doctors told him the foot had to come off, and he refused, choosing death at 54 over losing the dancer's body that had launched his career. This episode traces the rags-to-riches life of Giovanni Battista Lulli, a miller's son from Florence discovered at 14 playing violin in a Harlequin costume during Mardi Gras and carried off to Paris as an Italian tutor for an exiled princess.

We follow his calculated abandonment of that princess during the Fronde, his 1653 dancing partnership with the teenage king in the Ballet Royal de la Nuit, his rise to superintendent of royal music, and the forged noble bloodline on his marriage certificate. Lully engineered a new French sound t ...