In Search of Beethoven
What a bugger it must be to be an actual, dead-set genius.
In Search of Beethoven is a lengthy and detailed examination of the life and works of Ludwig van Beethoven, who was a pianist and composer of genius, and yet a man pretty much like any other man of this time and circumstances.
The film offers lashings of sublime music and cleverly reverent comment on his achievements, but one of the enduring impressions I was left with was of an otherwise ordinary man who grappled with all-too-human problems of economic necessity, human relationships and, especially, deafness, as he worked out what to do with what he called “Heaven’s most precious gift to me”: his art. While Beethoven the man is fretting about finding a wife and paying his bills, he is producing works that one of the authorities in the film describe as “conversations with his Creator.”
British director Phil Grabsky made In Search Of Mozart in 2006 and his Beethoven follow-up uses a similarly satisfying formula – illustrated biographical detail conveyed by a narrator, lots and lots of beautifully performed music and a scarily clever line-up of all kinds of experts to help us understand what it all means. The historical and technical detail provided by the dazzling array of expert musicologists, historians, conductors and musicians is set against a human backdrop: Grabsky had access to Beethoven’s reassuringly mundane letters and diaries to breathe life into his story.
Born in quite humble circumstances—his father was a musician in the court of the Elector of Hanover—Beethoven was both suppressed and sustained by the class system in the society he inhabited. He was paid by members of the aristocracy, but his humble origins meant that he was considered unworthy of any of the “well-born” women he met and fell in love with.
His performing and composing genius surfaced at a very early age and the young Beethoven left his home in Bonn to study with one of the musical giants of his time, Joseph Haydn, in Vienna. Struggling to maintain a respectable social life on the stipend he was getting from the Elector, Beethoven tried to scam both Haydn and the Elector. He was swiftly summonsed back to Bonn but he returned to Vienna and wowed the locals with his dazzling talents as a pianist and composer.
Securing further patronage from members of the Viennese aristocracy, Beethoven set out to equal or better the musical giants of his time, Haydn and Mozart. Among other things, he composed piano concertos that required such a high degree of technical dexterity that his more humble contemporaries could not play them.
Beethoven was an admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte and the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution. He originally dedicated his third symphony to Bonaparte but, when he crowned himself emperor, flying in the face of Beethoven’s dream of a new world order based on the brotherhood of man, Beethoven scratched out the title and rechristened the symphony Eroica. “He may be ruler of the world, but mine is the empire of the mind,” said Beethoven.
The film is visually effective, too. The director faced a really interesting challenge: because his raw material was music and the spoken word, there was a danger that the film could become a procession of talking heads and performing musicians. Grabsky avoided this and kept me interested by making me look very closely at details I might have glossed over, like the fingers of virtuoso pianists, the keys they manipulated and the crazed veneers of venerable violins. Pushing the visuals even harder, Grabsky showed me very big close-ups of things like the buttons of the back of a conductor’s coat. I was often enthralled.
In Search of Beethoven is a film I can confidently say I would never have seen unless I had been obliged to review it, and I’m glad I saw it. It gave me an interesting insight into the life of a man who, in the words of historian Cliff Eisen, performed the “heroic act of coming to grips with a disability so profound that it threatened his image of himself.” Beethoven’s deafness is like a ghostly character in the film. Firstly damaging his relations with society, it eventually stands between his music and the world and leaves the viewer in awe of his aural imagination. “All my other circumstances are subservient to my Art,” he says.
Musicologist Johnathan Del Mar says that, by the time of Beethoven’s death at 57, his works had “inevitably given rise to a re-evaluation of the past, the present and the future.” Not bad for a hearing-impaired musician. He gave rise to a new word, too: Beethovenian. Cool.
Neil Wilson
IN SEARCH OF BEETHOVEN (G): Next screening at The Village Theatre is Sunday 19 July at 4.30pm.
