When Niccolò Paganini died in 1840, the Catholic Church refused him burial, convinced he had made a pact with the devil, and his remains were moved between cellars and temporary graves for decades. The truth behind the refusal was mundane: he waved away a priest offering last rites because he did not believe he was dying yet. This episode strips away the supernatural myths to find the real man, from his working-class childhood in Genoa, where a struggling ship chandler father taught him mandolin at five and violin at seven, to the teachers who kept passing him upward because none could keep up with him.

We look at how the French invasion of 1796 forced the family into rural isolation, where Paganini took up the guitar and rewired his understanding of harmony, and how he later became court violinist to Napoleon’s sister Elisa Bonaparte. We examine the physiology behind his impossible technique, including the suspected connective tissue disorder that let him span three octaves in a single hand, his revival of artificial harmonics and left-hand pizzicato, and the broken string stunt he engineered by filing notches into his strings. The episode also covers the Guarneri violin he called Il Cannone, his generosity toward Berlioz, the syphilis treatments that poisoned him with mercury, the failed Paris casino, and the Italian idiom Paganini non ripete.

• How he manufactured rivalries with conservative players like Louis Spohr to sell tickets
• Why Yehudi Menuhin believed composing on guitar shaped his approach to the violin
• The 15-year relationship with singer Antonia Bianchi and his devotion to their son Achille
• Why refusing an encore for the King of Sardinia got him exiled for two years
• Caprice No. 24 and its variations by Liszt, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, and Andrew Lloyd Webber