You're listening to song exploder where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh, your way.

My name's Yo-Yo Ma. The prayer lead came into my life when I was four years old. It was literally the first piece of music I learned.

But I think I've performed the prayer lead a hundred times, maybe more. And 58 years later, I'm still learning from it.

Yo-Yo Ma is perhaps the most famous and well-loved cellist in the world. He was born in Paris in 1955. His family moved to the US when he was seven. He played for President Kennedy that year.

He played at Carnegie Hall for the first time when he was 16. He's won 18 Grammys and he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

For this special episode of song exploder, the last episode of this year, Yo-Yo Ma is going to break down this piece, which he didn't create, but he's performed so many times.

It's the prayer lead from Yo-Han Sebastian Bach's cello suite number one in G major. It's one of the most famous pieces of music written for the cello.

Yo-Yo Ma first recorded the Bach cello suites in 1983 at age 27. He recorded them again in 1998 and now at age 62, he's recorded them for what he says might be the last time.

It's for an album called Six Evolutions Bach cello suites. Yo-Yo Ma spoke to me about what's changed over the years, about the way he approaches this piece of music.

But first, a little history. For that, I turned to author Eric Siblin, who wrote an award-winning book on the history of Bach's cello suites.

My name's Eric Siblin and I'm the author of the cello suites, JS Bach, Pablo Casal's, and the search for a Baroque masterpiece.

The date that's traditionally used to refer to the composition of the cello suites is 1720, but the reality is that that's a guesstimate.

Because Bach's original manuscript went missing, it's one of the many mysteries that surrounds this colossal music.

In the early 18th century, there wasn't a lot of music written for solo cello.

It was very much a background instrument, sort of plotting in the background like an adventurous bass line for the most part.

So for Bach to write solo music for the cello was super radical at the time.

Bach died in 1750. He'd been a successful composer, but not massively famous during his own lifetime.

He was respected in many circles, essentially musical circles, you know, a musician's musician he was.

And he hadn't made any plans to preserve his own work. It wasn't until decades after his death that his music started to become popular.

And so many pieces of his canon didn't see the light of day for a long time.

And one of the pieces of music that took the longest to see the light of day was the cello suites.

They were discovered one day in 1890 by the cellist Pablo Casal's. He was only 13 years old. He found a secondhand copy of the cello suites in a bookstore in Barcelona.

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