Pete Townshend of The Who has credited a 17th-century composer in a powdered wig as the structural blueprint for his stadium anthems. This episode strips away the period-drama stereotype to find the gritty, relentless theater musician behind Henry Purcell. Born in Westminster around September 1659, just as Charles II’s Restoration reopened theaters and cathedrals starved of music under Puritan rule, he lost his father as a small child, was placed as a Chapel Royal chorister by his uncle, and absorbed French and Italian styles through teacher Pelham Humfrey, who had studied under Lully.

We follow what happened when his voice broke at 14 and he apprenticed with the king’s organ builder John Hingston, gaining a hands-on understanding of instruments that shaped his composing. The conversation covers John Blow stepping down from Westminster Abbey so his 20-year-old student could take over, anthems tailored to the two-octave bass of Reverend John Gostling, Dido and Aeneas at a Chelsea girls’ boarding school, the descending ground bass of Dido’s Lament, the semi-opera formula of The Fairy Queen, music for 42 plays in his final six years, and his death in 1695 at about 36.

• How Purcell bent Italian intensity and French rhythm to the natural cadence of English speech
• Why a girls’ school became the ideal incubator for England’s first fully sung opera
• Competing theories on his death: a wife’s locked door or tuberculosis
• His funeral music for Queen Mary sung at his own burial and later used in A Clockwork Orange
• The famous wedding Trumpet Voluntary that was actually written by Jeremiah Clarke