At 37, having just premiered the nearly four-hour William Tell in Paris, Gioachino Rossini walked away from opera and never wrote another. This episode examines the mechanics of his rise and his withdrawal, from a working-class childhood in Pesaro with a jailed trumpeter father and a comic-opera-singer mother, through string sonatas written at 12 and a conservatory in Bologna he abandoned rather than study more counterpoint.

The conversation explains the 'Code Rossini' that let him write 27 operas between 1812 and 1819, the crescendo that worked like a build to an EDM drop, and the reused overture attached to The Barber of Seville. It covers the stability of his Naples years under impresario Domenico Barbaja, his muse and wife Isabella Colbran, the disastrous Barber premiere in Rome, Rossini fever in Vienna, an awkward meeting with a deaf B ...