In 1919 a nine-year-old wrote his mother a solemn letter confessing that he was not meant to be an athlete but a composer, and asking her to stop making him play football. This deep dive follows Samuel Barber from a West Chester, Pennsylvania household with a physician father, a pianist mother, and an aunt, Louise Homer, who was a leading contralto at the Metropolitan Opera, to the Curtis Institute at 14, where he trained in composition, piano, and voice.

The episode charts the 1937 Salzburg Festival milestone, the 1938 premiere of the Adagio for Strings under Toscanini, wartime service and the withdrawn Second Symphony, the Capricorn years with partner Gian Carlo Menotti, two Pulitzer Prizes for Vanessa and the Piano Concerto, and the 1966 Antony and Cleopatra failure at the new Met that led to depression, alcoholism, and isolation.

• Why Barber held to tonal harmony while contemporaries embraced Schoenberg’s 12-tone method
• His NBC radio work as a baritone and his own recording of Dover Beach
• Playing and singing the entire Vanessa score for Rudolf Bing in his office
• The dissonant song cycle Despite and Still, premiered by Leontyne Price, and the Agnus Dei choral version of the Adagio
• His UNESCO International Music Council presidency and a catalog largely recorded before his death in 1981 at 70