In an unprecedented move, in old regime Berlin of the 1780s, Sara, Bella, and Fanny Itzig, along with a dozen-and-a-half other young women, opened their homes up as art and literary salons. They welcomed musicians, thinkers, writers and artists to come together and get to know each other.

In mid-eighteenth-century Berlin, when changed tastes had already relegated the music of Johann Sebastian Bach to obscurity, one family, the Itzigs, kept the flame of his music burning, passing it through generations until one family member set the bonfire with it that would become today’s early music movement.