Antonín Dvořák said he would gladly trade all his symphonies to have invented the train. This episode follows the eldest of 14 children of a butcher, innkeeper and zither player in the Bohemian village of Nelahozeves, where a new railway station sparked a lifelong obsession. It traces his German-language schooling under the hot-tempered Antonín Liehmann, the Prague organ school, and years earning a few dollars a month in restaurant bands before joining the Provisional Theatre Orchestra under Smetana and Wagner.

The episode covers his failed Wagnerian imitations, burned symphonies and an opera returned as unperformable, his unrequited love for Josefina Čermáková and marriage to her sister Anna in 1873, and the loss of three infant children that forged his honest folk-rooted voice. It then follows the Austrian state grants judged by Brahms and Hanslick, the overnight success of the Slavonic Dances through publisher Simrock, anti-Czech resistance from the Vienna Philharmonic, the Stabat Mater triumph at the Royal Albert Hall, and his 1892 appointment at the National Conservatory in New York.

• Why the Slavonic Dances contain no borrowed folk melodies, and what the furiant and dumka contribute
• Harry Burleigh’s spirituals and Dvořák’s public declaration about the foundation of American music
• The pentatonic scale and syncopation behind the New World Symphony and the summer in Spillville, Iowa
• The rewritten coda of the Cello Concerto as a private farewell to Josefina
• Rusalka, the Austrian House of Lords, and a 1904 funeral that filled the streets of Prague