Bernstein on Beethoven’s 5th

Music Appreciation
Written By Edward Wolfe

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

What makes great music great?

Greater musicians than me have wrestled with this question for years. I found a recording of a lecture about Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony given by the inimitable conductor, composer, and communicator Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990). Explore some of the sketches Beethoven created for this symphony and then discarded, and perhaps why he did not use them, making the finished music truly great and timeless.

If you’d like to hear this great musician’s thoughts on one of the greatest symphonies ever written, click on the 16-minute recording below.

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Edward Wolfe

Edward Wolfe has been a fan of Christian apologetics since his teenage years, when he began seriously to question the truth of the Bible and the reality of Jesus. About twenty years ago, he started noticing that Christian evidences roughly fell into five categories, the five featured on this website.
Although much of his professional life has been in Christian circles (12 years on the faculties of Pacific Christian College, now a part of Hope International University, and Manhattan Christian College and also 12 years at First Christian Church of Tempe), much of his professional life has been in public institutions (4 years at the University of Colorado and 19 years at Tempe Preparatory Academy).
His formal academic preparation has been in the field of music. His bachelor degree was in Church Music with a minor in Bible where he studied with Roger Koerner, Sue Magnusson, Russel Squire, and John Rowe; his master’s was in Choral Conducting where he studied with Howard Swan, Gordon Paine, and Roger Ardrey; and his doctorate was in Piano Performance, Pedagogy, and Literature, where he also studied group dynamics, humanistic psychology, and Gestalt theory with Guy Duckworth.
He and his wife Louise have four grown children and six grandchildren.

https://WolfeMusicEd.com
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