Johann Sebastian Bach walked roughly 280 miles on foot to hear Dieterich Buxtehude play, overstayed a four-week leave by months, and was later jailed for nearly a month for “too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal.” This episode strips away the marble-bust image to find the orphan from Eisenach who lost both parents by age ten, copied his brother’s locked-away manuscripts by moonlight for six months, and reverse-engineered Vivaldi’s concertos in Weimar to build his own musical language.

We follow him to Cöthen, where Prince Leopold’s Calvinist court freed him to write the Brandenburg Concertos and cello suites, and where he returned from a trip to find his wife Maria Barbara already dead and buried. We cover his twenty children, ten of whom survived, the grueling Leipzig years producing a new cantata nearly every week while fighting the council over firewood, the 1747 fugue challenge from Frederick the Great that produced The Musical Offering, and the botched eye surgeries by the charlatan John Taylor that preceded his death in 1750. Finally, we trace his 150 years in an unmarked grave, Mendelssohn’s 1829 revival, and his three pieces on the Voyager Golden Record.

• Why a music teacher would lock manuscripts away from his own brother in the 1690s
• How Italian momentum from Vivaldi merged with German structure in Bach’s Weimar years
• How strict musical form served as a container for overwhelming grief
• The improvised three-part fugue on a fortepiano that stunned the Prussian court, and the six-part fugue that followed
• Google’s 2019 AI doodle and what it means if a machine can learn the rules of Bach’s harmony