When Niccolò Paganini died in 1840, the Catholic Church refused him burial, convinced he had made a pact with the devil, and his remains were moved between cellars and temporary graves for decades. The truth behind the refusal was mundane: he waved away a priest offering last rites because he did not believe he was dying yet. This episode strips away the supernatural myths to find the real man, from his working-class childhood in Genoa, where a struggling ship chandler father taught him mandolin at five and violin at seven, to the teachers who kept passing him upward because none could keep up with him.

We look at how the French invasion of 1796 forced the family into rural isolation, where Paganini took up the guitar and rewired his understanding of harmony, and how he later became court violinist to Napoleon's sister Elisa Bonaparte. We e ...