Published: November 19, 2006
THE new movie "Copying Beethoven" has one of the great musical highlight reels — a visually stunning performance of the monumental Ninth Symphony, shrunk to about 10 minutes. The piece ends with
Beethoven's audible heartbeats and the sight of a soundless ovation from the point of view of the deaf composer-conductor. Beethoven is turned toward the audience, and the soundtrack activates into clapping and cheering. You want to yell, "It's the ultimate feel-good musical!"
But this movie, given its limited release and lukewarm reviews, might end up being as memorable as "Wellington's Victory" (a forgotten symphony composed by none other than Beethoven). It is unlikely to achieve the status of "Amadeus," the film that left millions with an iconic — if to some distorted — image of Mozart.
As one of the titanic figures of Western culture, though, Ludwig surely deserves his own "Amadeus." Why has no movie captured the imagination of the masses on his behalf?
It's not for lack of trying. But there may be something about the nature of the Beethoven myth, and the bare facts of his biography, that challenges fictionalization in a way the Mozart myth doesn't.
"There is something untouchable about Beethoven, isn't there?" said Richard Kramer, a musicologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. It is difficult, he said, to get past his image as champion of the joyful, universal brotherhood enshrined in the Ninth's last movement and its "Ode to Joy."
Among the many composer biopics, at least a dozen have featured Beethoven. They are mostly obscure movies, dating to the silent era. This latest entry, "Copying Beethoven," is about a young, improbably female scribe who helps Beethoven prepare his Ninth. Perhaps its best-known predecessor is "Immortal Beloved" (1994), an episodic account of the search for the mysterious subject of a love letter written by the composer.
Like "Copying Beethoven," which was directed by Agnieszka Holland and features Ed Harris in a killer wig, "Immortal Beloved" hits on the main themes: Beethoven's deafness, his conflicted relationship with his nephew, Karl, the iconoclastic Ninth, genius as a license to be a jerk. Consider this line, uttered by Beethoven to a young lady piano pupil: "Your lack of passion is unforgivable. I shall have to beat you." Her playfully proffered hand gets a hard smack.
Turned around, the issue may not be the lack of the ultimate Beethoven film but the success of "Amadeus" as a piece of filmmaking — it is based on a brilliant play by Peter Shaffer, about the nature of genius, and has the direction of Milos Forman. It also has the benefit of a great legend — that Salieri killed Mozart — and an earthy, profane yet transcendent central character.
Maynard Solomon, a biographer of both Mozart and Beethoven, said "Amadeus" tapped into a "fundamental myth" about the jealousy of Salieri, a mediocrity, over the genius of the "eternal child" touched by God. Beethoven's myth is altogether different. "The heroic myth never really reaches us on a personal basis," he said, "but the 'Amadeus' myth does."
That myth-making began early on. Schumann wrote in 1841 that the mere sound of Beethoven's name "has the ring of eternity."
John C. Tibbetts, the author of "Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography" (Yale University Press, 2005), wonders if filmmakers would do better to focus on Beethoven the revolutionary, the challenger of the aristocracy, the creator of art forms, or the iconoclast. They could even focus on the more socially adept young man.
"It would be fun to see a movie about a young rascal Beethoven," said Dr. Tibbetts, who introduced the Holland film at a screening in Chicago. "Maybe people just can't quite shake that mythic image."
Other specifics of Beethoven's life do not make it easy for filmmakers. Beethoven's relationships with women were fraught. He loved several but had no lasting bonds, and his sexuality is strangely inaccessible, Dr. Kramer said. In his music, "he's passionate about some things, but you don't get the voyeur's sense of entering into Beethoven's erotic zones."
The matter of Beethoven's nephew, too, does not lend itself to Hollywood romanticizing, although there is a 1988 movie called "Beethoven's Nephew." Beethoven waged a long, ugly battle with his brother's widow for custody of her son, Karl. His obsessive relationship became destructive for both men. The story is not pretty.
It is hard enough for movies to delve into the lives of artists, where the central action often happens inside their skulls, but one of the signature themes of Beethoven's biography — a composer who goes deaf — does not lend itself to movie dialogue. In "Copying Beethoven," the composer's deafness seems to turn on and off depending on the scene. In "Immortal Beloved," characters write their words on a slate for Gary Oldman's Beethoven to read; then they read them aloud for the benefit of the audience. The effect is to slow the action.
Maybe Beethoven's personality, or at least his reputation, makes him a less attractive subject. "There's too much lore about his ill temper and unsociability," said Theodore Albrecht, a musicologist at Kent State University. Actually, Dr. Albrecht said, Beethoven turns out to have been quite a sociable man earlier in his life, and a friend to fellow professionals.
Dr. Albrecht also pointed out that the source material for Mozart's inner life, and the world of his family and friends, is much richer than Beethoven's. Mozart and his relatives — especially his father, Leopold — were prodigious letter writers who existed in a literary milieu. "Beethoven was in a very practical musical community and family." With Beethoven, Dr. Albrecht said, the letters are fewer and more businesslike. Beethoven does have the conversation books, which friends used to communicate with him, but there is little in them from Beethoven himself, and not much in the 137 notebooks has been translated into English.
Maybe one day there will be an iconic film, perhaps about the rebel Beethoven, the vulnerable Beethoven, the young lion Beethoven.
"But what makes this man interesting to the world," said Lewis Lockwood, a professor of music at Harvard University and a Beethoven biographer, "is the music he wrote."
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