Arcangelo Corelli’s admirers invented a family tree tracing him back to Noah, yet the real man was so grounded and disciplined that he died wealthy, amassed a priceless art collection, and was buried in the Pantheon beside Raphael. This episode strips away the folklore to reveal the 17th-century Italian violinist and composer who effectively wrote the operating system of modern Western music.

We follow Corelli from his rigorous training in Bologna, where he entered the Accademia Filarmonica at 17, into the freelance patronage economy of Rome under Queen Christina of Sweden and Cardinal Ottoboni. There he transformed chaotic ensembles into disciplined orchestras of up to 150 players, half of them violinists bowing in unison. We explore his restrained playing style, his refusal to perform Handel’s flashy high passages, his 30-year perfectionism over Opus 6, and how he codified functional major and minor tonality that Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, and even Thomas Jefferson absorbed.

• Why the tales of a wandering prodigy chased out of Paris by Lully do not hold up
• How Corelli’s hiring practices created the lush unified string sound of the modern orchestra
• The 10-second sustained-note test he demanded of any violinist joining his ensemble
• Double stops, arpeggios, and bariolage: making the violin rival the human voice
• The paradox of standardization that gave us the symphony orchestra but erased older musical dialects