moving away from the conventional sonata style (most of his late string quartets have more than 4 movements, sometimes as many as 7). Criticism In his book The Joy of Music, Leonard Bernstein, who, in his television documentary Bernstein on Beethoven admitted that he considered Beethoven the greatest composer who ever lived, nevertheless criticized his orchestration as sometimes being "downright bad", with "unimportant" orchestral parts being given too much prominence. Bernstein attributed this to Beethoven's ever-increasing deafness, which presumably rendered him incapable of judging how much louder than another a given instrument might be playing at certain moments. He repeated some of this criticism in the 1982 miniseries Bernstein/Beethoven, a PBS miniseries containing performances of all nine symphonies, several overtures, one of the string quartets, and the Missa Solemnis. But at the same time, Bernstein added that what makes Beethoven great is his perfect sense of form – his ability to realize what the next note always had to be. References Sources Musical style Classical music analysis