In 1687, conducting a grand Te Deum to celebrate Louis XIV’s recovery from surgery, Jean-Baptiste Lully brought his heavy wooden staff down on his own toe. Gangrene set in, doctors told him the foot had to come off, and he refused, choosing death at 54 over losing the dancer’s body that had launched his career. This episode traces the rags-to-riches life of Giovanni Battista Lulli, a miller’s son from Florence discovered at 14 playing violin in a Harlequin costume during Mardi Gras and carried off to Paris as an Italian tutor for an exiled princess.

We follow his calculated abandonment of that princess during the Fronde, his 1653 dancing partnership with the teenage king in the Ballet Royal de la Nuit, his rise to superintendent of royal music, and the forged noble bloodline on his marriage certificate. Lully engineered a new French sound to serve absolute monarchy: fast dances, homophonic clarity, the comedy-ballet invented with Moliere, and tragedie en musique built on the twelve-syllable Alexandrine. He then purchased a royal opera privilege that made it a crime for anyone else in France to stage an opera, ruled with legendary cruelty, and fell from favor when the pious Madame de Maintenon reshaped Versailles and a 1685 scandal involving a page boy cost him the king’s protection.

• Why Louis XIV needed an outsider with no noble family to build the soundtrack of absolute monarchy
• How Lully bypassed the polyphonic Great Violins and reshaped the Little Violins into a driving, unified ensemble
• The French overture with its dotted rhythms and its later influence on Bach and Handel
• The horrifying account of his assault on pregnant chorister Marie Le Rochois before the premiere of Armide
• Why the modern conductor’s baton descends directly from the staff that killed him