Not Talking Down to Us

Terry Teachout on the glory that was fine television. An excerpt:

In his 1954 debut, "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony," Bernstein chats with the unseen TV audience in a studio whose floor is covered with a huge painting of the first page of the conductor's score of the symphony's first movement, walking from measure to measure to point out pertinent details with his foot. Most ingenious of all are the sections in which he shows what the Fifth Symphony might have sounded like had Beethoven incorporated his discarded sketches for the first movement into the finished work. Never has a music-appreciation lecture been more informative—or more exciting.

Here is Part One of the Leonard Bernstein program.