For a sneak preview of presidential biographer supreme Edmund Morris’s lecture on Beethoven next Tuesday, December 13, it’s podcasting to the rescue.

Following his years at Spy magazine and stints in nearly every subgenre of media out there, Kurt Andersen started NPR’s popular Studio 360, which recently started podcasting (scroll down).

On this past Saturday’s show [5.9 MB MP3; right-click and save to download], Andersen asks Morris what Beethoven meant to him as a child. Morris grew up in a colonial family in British East Africa and wrote the defining biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Andersen’s a great interviewer and ties in both books, Morris’s African roots and Beethoven’s “Machiavellian tendencies” into one heck of an interview. Check it out.