In this special Christmas Day performance at the Berlin Wall in 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducts Beethoven’s glorious Ninth Symphony. An affirmation of optimism, beauty, and universality written when the composer was almost completely deaf, you can watch the full performance—part of our exploration of Bernstein’s extensive body of work—now on Carnegie Hall : carnegiehallplus.com | Carnegie Hall

The “Tenth” Symphony When the young Leonard Bernstein was a student at Harvard University he went to Dmitri Mitropoulos's first concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1936, which included the conductor’s own arrangement for string orchestra of Beethoven's longest, most complex string quartet: Op. 131 in C sharp minor. ''I went out of my mind and have been ever since,'' Bernstein later recalled. “When I became a conductor, some years later, one of the first works I yearned to perform was t

🎼 Leonard Bernstein Meets Beethoven — with Maximilian Schell In 1982, Leonard Bernstein and actor Maximilian Schell joined forces for Bernstein/Beethoven, an 11-part television series filmed in Vienna. Across its episodes, Bernstein conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in all nine symphonies while Schell narrated, reading from Beethoven’s letters and reflections. Bernstein explored Beethoven’s lifelong “struggle for inevitability” — the idea that his music sounds effortless only after years of pai