When the King of Spain ordered Luigi Boccherini to change a passage he disliked, the composer went home and doubled it, then played it again and was fired on the spot. This episode explores the life behind that act of defiance, from a childhood in Lucca, Italy, where his musician father began cello lessons at age five, through teenage years touring to Rome and Vienna’s Burgtheater. On the road he learned to play violin parts on the cello at original pitch when violinists fell ill, a feat of physical mastery that reshaped what he believed the instrument could do.

We follow his move to Madrid in 1768, his patronage under Infante Luis Antonio, and the exile to the small mountain towns of Arenas de San Pedro and Candeleda after the royal clash. Rather than ending his career, that isolation let him absorb Spanish guitar and street traditions into his elegant galante style, producing works like the Night Music of the Streets of Madrid and the fandango finale of his fourth guitar quintet. The conversation covers his signature two-cello string quintet, more than 100 of them cataloged by Yves Gerard in 1969, patronage from Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia and Lucien Bonaparte, and the loss of two wives and four daughters before his death in Madrid in 1805.

• Why 18th-century court musicians were legally and socially treated as servants
• The physical demands of playing high violin repertoire in the cello’s upper register
• How swapping a viola for a second cello changed the acoustic feel of chamber music
• Sheet music published in Paris that reached patrons while he stayed in the mountains
• Why his later music sounds like sunlight despite relentless personal grief