Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young,

and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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Welcome to the Quillett Podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

A few weeks ago, a pair of podcasters at Vaux ran a feature called How Beethoven's Fifth Symphony put the classism in classical music.

In it, the podcasters claimed that, quote, wealthy white men had turned Beethoven into a symbol of their superiority and importance.

For women, LGBT, and people of color on the other hand,

quote, Beethoven's symphony may be predominantly a reminder of classical music's history

of exclusion and elitism.

Here at Qualette, it attracted a great rebuttal from a symphony cellist and podcaster named Daniel Lelchuck, who wrote an impassioned defense of Beethoven, noting that the composer's appeal spans the entire world and every race of people. He also reminded us that Beethoven lived in interesting times.

His career coincided with the rise of Napoleon and Beethoven saw in the French leader a

symbol of what we would now call democratic ideals.

This week I spoke to Lelchuk over the phone about Beethoven's wider world and the best way to

understand the great composer's music within the grand arc of history.

Daniel Lelchuck is a world-turing cellist with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra

and the host of the Talking Beats Podcast. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

A lot of people I think their image of classical composers,

...