When Giuseppe Verdi died in 1901, an estimated 300,000 people filled the streets of Milan led by an 820-person choir, mourning a man who claimed he only wanted to be left alone to inspect his cornfields. This episode dismantles the peasant myth Verdi cultivated for the press: born in 1813 to an innkeeper and a spinner who bought him a spinet and paid for tutoring, he was rejected by the Milan Conservatory at 18 for being too old, unorthodox, and technically a foreigner from the Duchy of Parma. Between 1838 and 1840 he lost his infant daughter, his infant son, and his 26-year-old wife Margherita, all while under contract to write a comedy that bombed after one performance.

We follow his return with Nabucco in 1842, the sixteen "galley years" that produced twenty operas, and the shrewd contracts that let him buy the Sant'Agata estate and his  ...