Excavations in 2009, 2014 and 2016, guided by eyewitness accounts and ground-penetrating radar, have turned up nothing: no bones, no clothing, no bullets. This episode moves past the empty grave to trace the full life of Federico García Lorca, born in 1898 in rural Andalusia to a sugar-boom landowner and a teacher, and obsessed first not with poetry but with the piano. We follow the grief after his conservatory teacher’s death in 1916 that pushed him to write prose modeled on musical forms, and the move to Madrid’s Residencia de Estudiantes, where he fell in with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel.

We cover the 1920 theatrical disaster about a cockroach and a butterfly that was laughed off the stage after four performances, the runaway success of his Andalusian ballads and the gypsy poet label he resented, Dalí’s rejection, the film he read as a personal attack, and the depression that sent him to New York just in time for the 1929 crash and a radicalizing stay in Harlem. Back in Spain he directed the traveling student theater La Barraca, wrote Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, and lectured in Buenos Aires on duende. The episode ends in Granada in August 1936, with Lorca sheltering in the home of Falangist friends, arrested anyway, executed by a militia, and erased by Franco’s censorship for decades.

• From Beethoven and Chopin to prose structured like a sonata
• The Residencia incubator and the painful triangle with Dalí and Buñuel
• How Wall Street and Harlem turned a folk poet into a critic of modernity
• Duende explained: art, death and the goosebumps of total vulnerability
• The 1965 police report and the competing theories about why he was killed