All language subtitles for Being Beethoven 1080p BBC

The date is May 7th, 1824.

Beethoven hasn't premiered
a symphony in 12 years,

and, finally, it's going to be
the premiere of this Ninth Symphony.

This is the happening of the decade.

Everyone is there -
all the important people,

all the politicians,
all the benefactors -

and Beethoven comes out.

By this time, he is completely deaf,

but he wants so much to be involved.

He's the creator.

The conductor that prepared it said,

"Listen, musicians, no matter what,
don't look at Beethoven."

Beethoven looks crazy.

I mean, he's jumping around
and he's gesticulating.

All the musicians
are just trying to play,

trying not to pay any attention
to this guy.

The music finished
and they started applauding.

Beethoven was still, with his head
in the score, conducting away.

One of the soloists, Caroline Unger,

grabbed him and turned him around
so he could see the audience,

and he seemed to be confused
because he had been in the middle

of the piece somewhere.

And then the audience saw this,

and they started applauding
louder and louder.

And he couldn't hear it.

This is one of the saddest moments
in his life, and, also,

at the same time, it's one of the
most triumphant moments in his life.

MAN AS BEETHOVEN:
"We finite beings are born
to suffer both pain AND joy.

"One might say that the best of us
obtain joy through suffering."

And, out of this experience,
he builds a piece that resonates...

..and can it mean different things
to everyone.

Not just on May 7th, 1824,
but today and tomorrow.

Because it's a piece
about connecting,

and this is fundamental
to human existence.

In 1792, at the age of 21,
Beethoven arrives in Vienna.

Vienna, at that moment,
is a city overflowing with music.

HE PLAYS SCALES

Music is everywhere.

Into that scene comes Beethoven

from a state of absolute anonymity.

Within less than a year, he creates
a really big name for himself.

As he has been doing
since he was a kid,

he expects to conquer the city
very quickly as a performer,

because this is something
he has been doing forever.

On the 17th of December, 1770,

the Beethoven family gather here
in the St Remigius Church, in Bonn,

to baptise the child
Ludwig van Beethoven.

Having this name
bears a big legacy.

It's the name of the grandfather,
who is a highly respected musician

and Kapellmeister here in Bonn.

There's a kind of
hidden agenda behind it.

There's a secret hope that
the young Ludwig van Beethoven

will surpass the career
of his grandfather.

Beethoven had a traumatic childhood,
it has to be said.

The father was drinking too much,
he was an alcoholic,

he was reeling around
the place, trying...

Obviously drowning his own sorrows,
because he was not a success.

It was one of these typical
situations, where a parent

has not really succeeded in
the career that his own parents

wanted him to follow.

So he more than forces it
onto Ludwig.

Ludwig, being the oldest of his
siblings -

the first of three children -

he's trying to appease
his parents in every way.

There's an extra pressure,

because you're supposed
to be setting an example.

This is a child being dragged
out of his bed in the middle

of the night to practise.

Ludwig, somehow, gets through all
of this and just takes the blows,

because, luckily, he loves music.

Luckily, it gives him
something back.

The young Ludwig just wants to sit
and improvise at the piano,

and his father says, "No, you
actually have to play the notes

"that I've written first, and,
then, once you have mastered this,

"you can actually start
to invent things on your own.

"You'll never really amount
to anything if you don't learn

"how to read music properly."

"Since my fourth year,

"music has been the first
of my youthful pursuits.

"Having become acquainted early on
with this dear muse, I grew to

"love it, and - as it often appeared
to me - it grew to love me in turn."

Johann van Beethoven has understood
the talent of his son.

He's enough of a musician to realise
he had a prodigy on his hands.

So he sets up a concert
and he advertises it in the paper.

The advertisement reads,
"Today, March 26th, 1778,

"the Electoral Court Tenorist,
Beethoven, will have the honour

"to produce two of his scholars.

"Mlle Averdonck, Court Contraltist,
and his little son of six years."

Beethoven, at this point,
is actually seven.

His father changes the age,
because six was the age

that Mozart was
when he became famous.

So, Johann van Beethoven is trying
to present his son as a new Mozart.

"As for mistakes,
so far as I am concerned,

"I have never really
had to learn that.

"Even as a child, I had such
a delicacy of feeling

"that I exercised it without
knowing that it had to be thus,

"or that it could be anything else."

I mean, any instrumentalist
who starts training

at the early age of three or four...

There is this speciality thing.

I'm not even sure
if Mozart and Beethoven,

as the most important prodigy
children in our culture,

have ever been told that they
are geniuses or they are special

or that they are very gifted.

They just were treated like,
"You have to do this.

"This is your job.

"You have to become a musician."

So, the interplay between
the piano-playing, gifted child

and the parents or the teachers
who take the gifts

as a serious message,

this is the important part.

This shouldn't be sadistic, and it
shouldn't be, you know, like...

..oppressive and too heavy
and too severe.

Of course, there should
be a good interplay.

But if everybody treats you
differently than any other child,

then your feeling of self,
your image of self, of course,

is influenced by that a lot.

It's sort of a devastating message
to any child.

At age ten, when it has become clear
that Beethoven is a prodigy,

is something really
quite remarkable,

he is a tiny, friendless,

grubby kid who has, um...

..is in some kind of world
of his own all the time.

It would be later be called his
"raptus", when he just goes off.

His landlord's daughter
accosts him and says,

"Why are you so dirty all the time?"

Beethoven says to her, "When
I'm grown up and I'm a great man,

"nobody will care."

The family has a very close contacts
to all sorts of court members,

being workers in different kinds
at the court.

His father is a singer at the time,
and his grandfather,

who died already
when he was very young,

he was even the chapel master
of the court chapel in Bonn.

Beethoven actually is very lucky
to be born into a society where,

on a daily basis,
he hears very good music

played by excellent musicians.

The most modern music comes by,
like Mozart symphonies.

The Hadyn symphonies are copied
weeks after they were composed.

They have them in Bonn.

We are here now in Schlosskirche,

which is the church of the court.

This is a church where Beethoven,
every morning,

is playing the organ there.

Before noon,
he is rehearsing with singers.

Often in the evening, he is playing
continua in the opera orchestra

or in the symphonic productions.

And it's real impressive...

..how this child,
because he's 11 years old,

is surviving in this snake pit

of an orchestra environment,
which is very difficult and hard.

And it proves he is very talented
and self-aware.

Beethoven was employed as court
organist, in Bonn, by the brother

of Emperor Joseph, from Vienna,
and there's one story that

tells us how wildly
Beethoven played the organ.

Beethoven made a bet with
a court singer and said,

"I can play dissonance that's
so wild that you cannot follow up

"your melody when you sing
the lamentaciones."

And, in fact, this happened.

There was a crash during
a court service because

Beethoven's harmonies were so wild.

And Beethoven got a warning.

He was told, "If you do that again,
you will be fired."

Beethoven the boy shows us already
the signs of the composer,

of the older man.

Wild, going to the extremes,
trying out unusual things,

and being very creative in his
music, be it improvised or written.

"Now that I've reached my 11th year,
in hours of blissful solitude,

"my muse has often whispered to me,

"'Try to write down the harmonies
of your soul.'

"I was almost shy,

"yet it was the will of my muse.

"I obeyed and wrote."

One of the things about Beethoven
that's true from the beginning

of his efforts as a composer is
that he has the capacity to make

huge strides in a very short time.

He composes these little
Dressler Variations on a March,

by a composer named Dressler.

I should admit that I am not sure,
if I would just find this piece,

I would right away say,
"Oh, I see it's Beethoven."

They are very well written already,
especially when we know

that it's an 11-year-old child.

But, to me, it's like learning stage
of his creative life.

Then, at the age of 14,
comes an astronomic leap

in the three Piano Quartets.

It's a change from an early,
gallant style to works

which are passionate,
structured, very mature,

and very Beethovenian.
I think that's the key point.

That they are much closer to
his mature voice than the works

he has written before, and it
does not seem to be gradual.

The E flat major concerto seems
to come from another planet.

Very shortly after the beginning,
the music stops completely.

And there is a motif of four notes,
just bare four notes...

HE PLAYS NOTES

..and this emptiness of letting
all the voices die

and just concentrating on these
four notes, almost minimalistic,

is something which he is going to
explore to a great and very deep

extent in his late string quartets.

To find a seed of it in a work
he wrote at 14 is...

..quite breathtaking. Very moving.

So, this is the very first letter
we know of from Beethoven.

It has been written
on September 15th, 1787.

At this time,
Beethoven is 16 years old,

so he is the eldest
of three or four children,

and Beethoven's father is very sad,
drinking more than ever.

His mother died two months ago,

and, Mother, he's missing
very hardly.

"She was my best friend.

"Oh, who was happier than I...

"..when I could still utter
the sweet name of Mother

"and heed was paid to it?

"And to whom can I say it now?

"To the dumb pictures
resembling her?

"The creations of my imagination?"

So, we see a boy trying to explain
his emotion and material situation,

and this is really touching.

It's clear that Ludwig has been
forced through every stage of

his life, unlike most children, who
work their way through their lives

organically, and then
when his mother died,

when he's 16 years of age,

he suddenly has to become an adult.

No choice.

And he takes that role on
with full compassion.

Even though he's never experienced
empathy or compassion

from his own father, he is trying
to do what he thinks is right

in the best way he knows.

The death of his mother, in effect,
ends his childhood.

He's making the money,
and he is keeping Dad together,

and he's keeping
the family together.

He is basically running
his younger brother's life.

That marks him for life, as well.
He always considered himself

the older brother who's telling
his younger brothers what to do.

The traumatic effect of this
can't be overestimated

and leaves a mark
on Beethoven's psyche.

I think the addiction part
of the father personality

is playing a big role
in the formation of Beethoven.

If you have an addicted father...

I mean, that makes every childhood
really tough

and really unpredictable
and prone to all sorts of eruptions.

On the other side,
also, love and affection.

So, as the object is twofold -

it's to be hated AND
you still love him -

the only way to deal with
a father object that's in

this addiction situation
is to go away.

To really abandon the object.

In 1792,
Beethoven travels to Vienna.

Vienna is the cultural capital,
attracting, like a magnet,

all the famous artists
and musicians of the period.

Mozart has just died one year before
and Haydn is already ageing.

And, so, destiny has really prepared
a vacant place for Beethoven.

Vienna, at this point,
is a city of palaces.

And its court music
is simply grander

and on a bigger scale
than anywhere else.

It's also a hotbed
of intrigues and cabals

and musicians competing
in the most bitter ways.

He doesn't really know
what his position is yet.

But Beethoven knows
he's studying with Haydn,

the greatest composer in the world.

Haydn had come through Bonn
and discovered this amazing kid

and said, "Come and study with me."

And, eventually,
Haydn writes back to Bonn,

he is going to be one of
the great musicians of Europe.

He wants to learn,

he wants to study counterpoint
to improve his technique.

He complains to other people
that Haydn is not very rigorous

as a counterpoint teacher.

But he also has trouble
with authority figures.

Because Beethoven
is the most self-motivated,

self-taught person imaginable.

He brings to Vienna
several of his most recent pieces

as showpieces for himself
to brag with.

And to show to others
what he's worth.

But, of course, he's also famous
for his incredible improvisations.

And he has a large arsenal of tools
at his disposal, which he heavily

employs every time he has
one of the very popular duels

between pianists.

Trills...

..double trills...

..triple trills.

And perhaps one of the most striking
ones is a duel which he has

with Daniel Steibelt.

His trick is trebles.

Steibelt arrives in Vienna,

he does not pay his respects to
Beethoven, which is a mistake.

Then they are present
at the same concert.

Steibelt improvises on the theme of
one of the movements of the piece

which Beethoven played.

And Beethoven sees it as an insult,
which it probably is,

a calculated challenge.

And he stands up...

..goes to the piano.
On the way, plucks a cello part

of one of the pieces which
Steibelt brought to that evening.

Puts it on the stand, turns it
upside down, plucks three or

four notes, at random, almost, from
the page and begins to improvise.

And, according to people
who are present there,

his improvisation
is absolutely breathtaking.

Steibelt evaporates.

Even though he's already
so known as

quite probably the best
piano player in Vienna,

he is not yet there as a composer.

And Beethoven is strategically
plotting his path to fame

as a composer as well.

One of the most important things
for Beethoven is to make contact

with the aristocrats.

The aristocrats are very literate,
musical people.

They are the ones who give
concerts in their palaces,

some of them on a weekly basis.

And this is a network of people
that meets regularly

and that hosts the best musicians
of the town.

Beethoven, like most musicians,
had to find people who would

pay for his works.

He had to make a living
as a teacher, as a composer.

7th Prince Lobkowitz meets
Beethoven in around 1790.

And Lobkowitz is one of these people
that thinks about

"How can I help him?"

and, eventually,
comes up with an annuity

to take away the problems,

and so Beethoven
is then able to create

some of his most important works.

That is Lobkowitz's
great contribution, I think.

He made it possible
for Beethoven to write

the kind of music that he wanted to
write, rather than necessarily

what his patron wanted to hear,
and that was very modern, new way.

Nowadays, we tend to think
there's this old aristocracy,

but it's not true.

I mean, noblemen and noblewomen
who supported Beethoven,

they are about his age.
I mean, they're in their early 20s

and so they are longing for fun
in their palaces!

And so they need
a character like Beethoven,

kind of a wild child,
who is the right guy for that.

I think Beethoven's music
is the essence

of the revolutionary thinking
which, of course,

swept all of Europe,
starting in Paris,

obviously,
in the great French Revolution.

This uprising was against
the rule of the aristocracy

and the rule of the aristocracy
was strongly connected with music.

Beethoven received a lot of help
from aristocratic patrons.

You would expect that, if they give
support, you have to return

the gesture by composing
something which glorifies them.

Beethoven doesn't do that.

I guess he doesn't
have the politeness,

or he doesn't have the interest
to do so. He's free.

He writes his own music,
"Give me support," they do,

"I write whatever I want."

This is a letter Beethoven writes
to his very best friend

Franz Gerhard Wegeler.

He addresses Wegeler as
"liebste beste", which means

"most loved, best one"

and Wegeler is the only friend
he addresses this way,

so this is very special for Wegeler.

In the time where this letter
is written,

Wegeler is with Beethoven in Vienna.

And he writes this letter
because he failed in friendship.

"Dearest Wegeler, best of friends,

"in what an abominable light
you have shown me to myself.

"I do not deserve your friendship.

"You are so noble, so indulgent
and, now, for the first time,

"I am unworthy of you.
How ashamed I am."

Beethoven, perhaps he insulted
Wegeler and, afterwards,

he learned from others that this
was perhaps not the best reaction!

"Oh, Wegeler, don't reject this hand
held out for reconciliation.

"I shall come to you myself
and throw myself into your arms,

"imploring you to restore
my lost friend and you will give

"yourself to me, to your penitent,
affectionate Beethoven."

So this is a very...almost
funny letter

because he throws himself to dust
to say, "Sorry"!

This happens very often and
Beethoven knows this from himself.

And he has to say sorry
to many of his friends

for his whole lifetime!

Beethoven is not the lonely guy.

He has many friends, but he is using
his friends for his purposes.

So he has, I would say,
three kinds of friends.

He has the nobility guys, where
he puts pressure on to get money

out of them.

He admires them, like Count
Lichnowsky or Lobkowitz,

but he's really using them.

Then, he has musician friends.

He invites these musicians
for dinner or for lunch

to find out how to write

for different instruments,
to find out how they are.

And, then, there are some
people in between.

Sometimes friends, sometimes just to
be used to get for some purposes.

One of them is this guy,
Nikolaus Zmeskall.

He is a count from simple nobility

and he's really fighting to

spend as much time with Beethoven
as possible.

There's one thing where Beethoven
puts on a trio of concerts.

Zmeskall is supposed to play the
cello, and then Beethoven finds

a professional cellist,
and he just kicks him out.

And I think this is
this inner feeling

of the Great Master Beethoven -
that everybody around him

has to support his creative works,
so he's taking what he can get.

In 1794, when Beethoven is 23
and thinks he's 25,

he writes a note to himself.

"Courage.

"In spite of all the weaknesses
of my body, my spirit shall rule.

"You are 25. This year
must determine the complete man.

"Nothing must remain undone."

He already understands that his body
is betraying him -

he's had trouble with his gut
from his teens,

he's had trouble with depression.

He understands also that there's
a self-realisation involved

and he's making a vow here, of
the kind that a lot of people make -

"It's going to be
different from now on,

"this is my New Year's resolution."

But when Beethoven writes
things like this,

he means them and he acts on them.

1795 is an extremely pivotal year
for Beethoven,

both as a composer
and as a musician.

In October of this year,
Beethoven brings out his Opus 1,

his three piano trios.

With Opus 1, Beethoven is,
essentially,

announcing his arrival
and the completion of his studies

and he's making his mark
as a serious composer.

In this year,
he has these three trios performed

at the Lichnowsky palace.

He's having the third
Trio in C Minor performed.

The innovative part is the way
he intensifies the development.

He has little motifs which he
develops in a kind of symphonic way.

This was not usually done
with chamber music.

Haydn listened to them
and seems to have said, yes,

they're excellent works
but I wouldn't have published

the third one because I don't think
the public will like that.

This was because Haydn felt it
was too intense for the public.

Beethoven is incredibly angry

and he thinks that Haydn is, in
fact, trying to sabotage his career

because Beethoven believed that this
was the best of the three.

Of course, C minor has been the most
important key for Beethoven

from the beginning.

Being one of the most
characteristically pathetic keys,

the one most reflective of this
darker side of his personality.

Beethoven is a passionate man
and, when he falls in love,

he goes after it with the same
intensity that he does his music!

# Einsam wandelt dein Freund

# Im Fruhlingsgarten

# Mild vom lieblichen

# Zauberlicht umflossen

# Das durch wankende

# Blutenzweige zittert...#

Adelaide has to do with a young
singer named Magdalena Willman,

who arrives from Bonn.

She's beautiful, she's talented,
he falls for her

and he takes up a poem that was
around at the time, named Adelaide.

# Adelaide...#

He possibly wrote it for her.

He possibly wrote it
as a matter of courtship.

And it's about man who's in love
with a woman named Adelaide.

He begins to see her name
everywhere.

Beethoven uses the name itself
to build up to a kind of

ecstatic climax,

which is that name.

# Adelaide

PIANO BUILDS

# Adelaide

# Adelaide. #

Two things about Adelaide.

Beethoven writes a fair number
of songs over the years,

but this was his hit tune.

This was the one that really took
off and, really,

that lasted, essentially,
for the rest of his life.

Secondly, he proposed
to Magdalena Willmann

because he had really fallen for her

and, years later, I believe,
her daughter asked her,

"Why didn't you marry him?"

And she said, "Because he was ugly
and half crazy."

This kind of ferocious passion
he brings to courtship is

another example not of his
connection to other people,

including women,
but of his lack of it.

He doesn't really know
what his effect on people is.

All he knows is what he feels.

I want to marry, oh, one
of these beautiful young women

of musical ambition,

who are noble women,
which never will happen.

There is a self-image
in Beethoven that is a narcissistic,

over-inflated idea of yourself,

and he has certainly had to deal
with something like that

all his life.

I think it has a lot to do
with this addiction thing

and the ambivalent relationship
with his father.

He has a personality

that is not easy to be around

because, one moment,
you can be having a conversation

and, the next minute,
he's furious about something

or he's feeling affronted by
something and he's in a rage.

And this kind of conflicting

amount of responses,

in short spaces of time,

means that it's not surprising
that he has this difficulty

with his colleagues and friends.

We hear it all the time
in his music.

It's absolutely raw.

The music,
it doesn't answer him back.

He can put it all there.

MUSIC: String Quartet No.6 in B Flat
Major, Op 18 by Ludwig van Beethoven

Right at the end
of the 18th century,

Beethoven's writing the sixth
Opus 18.

It's his first adventure
in string quartets

and, of those six,

this Malinconia is
the most extraordinary thing.

Malinconia's an amazing movement
and very unusual,

because it has that particular
title, Malinconia - melancholy.

That's an instruction
to the performers

of how the music should be.

Then, after this amazing,

slow introduction...

AGGRESSIVE STRINGS

..shocking and dissonant

and there's no real sense of where
he's going with the music.

We go into something
that's completely different.

LIGHT BOUNCY STRINGS

Very cheerful, elegant.

Seemingly, the melancholy
has been banished,

never to return...

..and then it does come back.

It's a memory, but it's significant.

It places a doubt.

The malinconia, the melancholy,

is going to be what we
remember from this piece

after we've had the last fanfare.

It's particularly clear, somehow,

that Beethoven himself
is a complex human being

who is grappling
with extremes of emotion

and not necessarily always
able to be resolve them

in his personal relationships,
particularly,

and then being daring enough
to put that in the music.

The way Beethoven's music works

is it articulates
the human condition

in ways that you didn't
realise existed.

"My ears continue to ring and hiss,
day and night.

"I must say that
I lead a wretched life.

"For two years, I've avoided
nearly all company,

"since it's impossible for me
to tell people that I am deaf."

Here is Ludwig, in his 20s,

when he knows something
serious is going wrong.

He's losing his hearing,

the most important thing
that he needs.

From year dot,

he's had his life put
in front of him by his father.

"You WILL be that prodigy.
You WILL be that virtuoso.

"You will be the greatest musician
that ever was born,"

so that, when he knows he's losing
the most precious sensibility,

his hearing, this is sending him

into a terrible state of despair.

What is going to do?

He can't tell anyone.
He can't share it.

He just has to try and cope

with the awful reality

of losing his hearing.

KETTLE DRUM VIBRATES

You do go through a process
whereby you think that hearing

is coming through the ears
and you want more through there

and you get frustrated that
that isn't the case.

I suspect that there might been
that situation with Beethoven,

where he was desperate
and frustrated

and angry that things
weren't coming through here.

They might have been distorted.
It could have been painful, distant.

All of those things might have
happened at the same time,

and he was not in control of that.

When you begin to lose
a particular sense,

all the other senses
become razor-sharp,

and it can take a while
for you to realise that.

When I began losing my hearing
from the age of eight,

I must have been naturally
looking at people more

and face-reading more, but I had no
idea I was actually doing that.

It was just a natural thing
to happen.

But I don't believe that he was
just simply losing his hearing,

where things were
becoming more and more faded.

I think certain sounds,
certain frequencies

were becoming less controllable.

It depends on
the acoustics he was in.

It depends on the piano
he might have played.

It depends on the piece of music,
the dynamic.

It depends what he was wearing.
All sorts of things like that.

Just the sheer energy
of paying attention, you know,

if you're tired, you hear less.

You know, you do.

"To give you an idea of this
strange deafness, let me tell you,

"that at the theatre, I must lean in
very near to the orchestra

"in order to understand the actor.

"If I'm some distance away,

"I do not hear the higher notes
of the instruments and voices.

"I'm surprised that there are people
who've never noticed it

"in conversation.

"Since I'm often distracted,
they attributed it to that."

So it seems that the high
frequencies that he's hearing

are missing and, also,
he mentions that he can't hear

quiet sounds,
but, when sounds are loud,

he's finding it unbearable.

From an ear surgeon's point of view,
that pushes towards

the type of hearing loss that
he may be suffering from.

Well, that's to say it's a problem

with the actual receptor of hearing,
the cochlea.

It's deep inside the temporal bone,
right in the middle of the skull

and it's there to give it
a very protected environment.

In those situations,

patients tend initially to lose
the high frequencies

and they often have a problem
hearing quiet sounds,

but find loud sounds
very unpleasant.

So I think Beethoven's
probably suffering

from a sensory hearing loss.

For Beethoven, his problem is

probably differentiating timbre
of different instruments,

and, particularly,
if his hearing loss,

which we think it is,
is more at high frequency,

then he's going to lose
the top instruments, the piccolos,

the flutes,

the top of the violin,

whilst maintaining the lower
frequencies - and that's going

to distort the overall perception
of what he's hearing.

So, socially, if you have
uncorrected,

severe or profound loss,

it's very difficult to take part
in conversations

so patients would
typically become isolated.

They withdraw from conversation.

They sit, they don't take part.
They don't interact.

I've been playing Beethoven's music
all of my life,

and, as a musician,

hearing is pretty vital.

Hearing is automatic, but listening
takes a special knack,

and listening is one of the greatest
of the skills that we are taught

when we learn music.

So for Ludwig to be losing
this one important element

of his senses during
his mid-twenties

has to be the cruellest
form of torture for any young man.

"Oh, if I were free from this,
I should embrace the world.

"My youth. Yes, I feel it is
only beginning now.

"Every day,
I draw nearer to the goal

"that I can sense
but not describe.

"Grant me only partial release
from my affliction, and you shall

"see me as joyful as it is possible
to be here on Earth.

"I shall seize fate by the throat,
it shall never wholly subdue me."

I mean, it's very sort of
ear-catching to think of Beethoven

as this huge sort of, you know,

forceful, unwashed character,
if you like.

But, I mean, he's just
so much more than that.

Those other sides of Beethoven,
especially the more

introspective side of Beethoven,
can be overlooked.

The Moonlight Sonata is...

There's nothing else quite like it.

We like to think of the
Moonlight Sonata in this very

sort of romantic way, sort of,
of course, the romantic image

of moonlight across the lake
and all that.

But it's really nothing to do
with that.

It's one of... Certainly the first
movement is one of the movements

that relates most closely to death
in all of his piano sonatas.

There's something of a distance
about that.

There's something a little bit
removed and untouchable about it.

There's no warmth to it at all,
really.

In 1802 -
Beethoven is 31 at this time -

Beethoven's doctor recommends

that he go spend some quiet time
out in the country in the hopes

of letting his hearing recover.

He goes to the town
of Heiligenstadt.

He spends some time there alone

and, during that time,
does a lot of soul-searching

and thinks about the problem
that he is facing.

He is taking a walk with his friend
Ferdinand Ries, and Ries hears

a shepherd playing on a flute,
and Beethoven is forced

to acknowledge
that he doesn't hear it.

So, in a sense, the facade
falls down for him.

He can no longer pretend,
even to his closest friends,

that he has normal hearing.

When Beethoven writes
the Heiligenstadt testament,

which is a letter to his brothers,
this is the moment when he realises

that it's not going to get better.

So it's a raw documentation
of grief, of tragedy.

"Oh, you men who think or say
that I am malevolent,

"stubborn or misanthropic,
how greatly do you wrong me?

"You do not know the secret cost

"which makes me seem that way
to you.

"Forgive me when you see me
withdraw from you,

"with whom I would so gladly mingle.

"Completely isolated, I only enter
society when compelled to do so.

"I must live like an exile."

This letter is a number of things
at the same time.

It's partly a suicide note.

It's a statement of defiance.

He finally says,
"I can't leave this world

"without having done
what I know I can do."

It's partly a credo,
an artistic credo.

And I think, in part,
it's an exorcism.

It's a way of getting down on paper
everything that he's feeling

at that moment, so he can go on.

"But what a humiliation for me
when someone standing next to me

"heard a flute in the distance
and I heard nothing.

"Such incidents drove me
almost to despair.

"A little more of that and
I would have ended my life.

"It seemed to me impossible to leave
the world until I had brought forth

"all that I felt was within me."

So he finishes the letter
to his brothers - I believe makes

a clear copy of it from a draft -

and he seals it, seeming to imply

that he's planning to mail it,
though he didn't.

And then he just instinctively,
in a gush of emotion,

he writes on the outside...

"Thus I bid you farewell.

"And, indeed, sadly.

"Yes, that fond hope,
which I brought here with me

"to be cured to a degree at least.

"This, I must now wholly abandon.

"As the leaves of autumn fall
and are withered,

"so likewise has my hope
been blighted.

"Almost as I came, I depart."

If he had actually committed
suicide, as he suggests

he was considering, this would
be taken as the suicide note.

But, as deep as the despair seems
to be in this document,

it didn't push him over the edge.

I think writing it down

may have even helped him
not to do that.

"Oh, Providence.

"Grant me at last
but one day of pure joy.

"It is so long since real joy
echoed in my heart.

"Never? No.

"That would be too hard."

The Heiligenstadt testament is
actually a moment of great clarity.

He sees the future.

The penny has dropped.

He knows what's going to happen
to him in a way...in many ways,

and he knows that he is going
to try to preserve his art

under extraordinary circumstances.
He's going to go deaf,

and he doesn't know yet
how he's going to manage to do it

when he's deaf, but he knows
that he's going to try.

He knows he's going to be unhappy.

He sees what's coming
and he accepts it.

Erm...

Beethoven had about as much courage

as a human being can have.

For me,
there are two astonishing things

about the Heiligenstadt testament
which are often overlooked.

One of them is that Beethoven
does not send this,

but, instead, he preserves it for
the rest of his life, carefully.

It's found in his desk at his death.

The second very astonishing fact
about this is that, while you might

think that the Heiligenstadt
testament is this very depressive

document which might signal
that Beethoven's going to remain

depressed for quite some time,

in fact, Beethoven comes back
to Vienna,

he resumes working right away,

and he writes some of the most
astonishing masterworks

that he's written to date.

"I'm not satisfied with what
I've composed up to now.

"From now on, I intend to embark
on a new path."

And this new element,
the new style of Beethoven,

is not necessarily beautiful.

It's sometimes aggressive.

In the Third Symphony, there is
a passage where the rhythm goes

against the regular beat.

I heard stories what actually
happened in the first performance,

that people played this...
MIMICS RHYTHM

This rhythm against a beat
and the orchestra got confused

and they had to start
all over again.

This is obvious
because it was so modern

and Beethoven always comes
with something new.

He's an innovator, a real innovator,

and he's not interested any more
in the bon gout,

as they said - the good taste,

but our feelings. The human soul.

And I think the deafness helped him
to find his self,

which was, of course, a very
new idea to find the inner voice.

And when you perceive,
really understand

what is inside you
in this magnified way,

then music emerges, reaches...

As we know, in Beethoven's
music...has such a huge heart

that it's big enough
to embrace the whole world.

Beethoven is the giant
who created the new world.

Everybody after Beethoven
copies Beethoven.

Everybody - Liszt, Mahler,

Schoenberg - everybody.

Music has changed.

There is music before Beethoven
and there's music after Beethoven,

and music after Beethoven
is an army of musicians

following his direction.

He's 38 years old.

Isn't it time he got married?
So he's looking for a wife.

Beethoven always falls in love

with the same type of woman
- beautiful, young,

aristocratic
and with a love for music.

She couldn't imagine at all
marrying this composer.

Some have proposed that he is going
after women

he knows are not available because
he's protecting himself and his art,

and I don't believe that.

I think that he just never
quite got the message.

SHE PLAYS FUR ELISE

We all know the Fur Elise tune.

# Da-da-da-da-da-da da-da-da... #

One of the tunes which is probably
the most popular

of Beethoven's tunes ever
for us today

was written by him for a female
friend as a personal token of love.

He's 38 years old...

"Isn't it time he got married?"
So he's looking for a wife.

He asked a friend to
try and find him a wife.

Therese Malfatti
is one of these women

apparently Ludwig typically
falls in love with.

He is her piano teacher.

He feels comfortable in her family,
which is a noble family.

He asked for some new clothes,
he asked for a mirror to check,

he wants new shirts, new ties,

so he's looking to smarten
his appearance.

In 1810, he actually
wanted to marry her

and, when he was turned down
and he heard that,

he was really devastated.

Your news has again plunged me
from the heights

of the most sublime ecstasy
down into the depths.

Am I then nothing more
than a music-maker

for yourself and the others?

Beethoven looks for love over
and over in unavailable women

and some have proposed
that, unconsciously,

he is going after women
he knows are not available

because he's protecting himself
and his art and so forth and so on.

I don't believe that.

I think that he just never
quite got the message.

Beethoven's day-to-day
everyday life was so, kind of,

hectic and dysfunctional
in many ways,

he was able to create

the life he wanted in his music...

..because it has love, passion,
tears, embraces -

everything is there.

I thank all those women
who rejected him

because he put all that passion
into the music.

In one of his rare flashes
of self-understanding,

Beethoven writes to a publisher
at one point,

"Everything I do outside music
is badly done and stupid."

MUSIC: Fur Elise
by Beethoven

June 1803,
Beethoven is 32 years old.

The heat and the dust
were wretched in Vienna,

so he always went somewhere
in the summer.

He arrives in Oberdobling,

it's just up the hill
from Heiligenstadt,

where, the autumn before, he had
written the cry from the cross,

which we call
the Heiligenstadt Testament.

It's also a kind of a suicide note
in which he...

..basically saw
for the first time clearly

what his life was going to be,

both in terms of what
he was attempting to achieve

and what he was going to
have to contend with.

His hearing was going to get worse.

His health, which involved
painful digestive problems,

that's not going to get better.

He turns, at one point, defiant
and says,

"I can't imagine killing myself

"when I haven't done
what I know I can do yet."

And, in June 1803,
he writes the Eroica Symphony.

MUSIC: Symphony No. 3, Eroica
by Beethoven

He writes it remarkably fast.
He wrote it in about three months.

But, now, it wasn't called
the Eroica yet.

When he conceived it, it was very
importantly called Bonaparte.

It was a piece specifically
about Napoleon,

the most famous, important person
in the world at that point.

MUSIC: Symphony No. 3, Eroica
by Beethoven

After the French Revolution in 1789,
there was a reign of terror,

and it wasn't clear what was going
to happen in France, but Napoleon

eventually rose to prominence with
a series of victories in battles.

The idea being to liberate Europe
from all the wicked regimes

which were seen to be
around at the time.

He sees Napoleon
as liberating Europe

and producing a sense of progress

and so Beethoven, perhaps,
sees himself

as a kind of musical equivalent,
trying to liberate music

from old-fashioned styles
and move forward.

What Beethoven relates to
with Napoleon so much

is the self-made man,
the self-made hero,

the person who made himself the most
important person in the world

by pulling himself up
by his own bootstraps.

Certainly, for Beethoven,

as a person who came from a small
town and an alcoholic father,

this is what one can accomplish
when one is free.

This is what freedom does
when you can develop

what you are born to be, what
capacities you were born to have.

That is what Beethoven thought
in terms of Napoleon

and it's certainly what he thought
in terms of himself.

And I think that conception is,
in one way or another,

all over his music

and it's all over for
the rest of his life, really,

and that's why his music,
at the time, was considered

to be a kind of revelation
of democracy among people.

MUSIC: Symphony No. 3, Eroica
by Beethoven

We are in the private living room
of Count Lobkowitz

and Lobkowitz is one of
the big patrons of Beethoven.

We can imagine the doors open

and in comes some old nobleman
with the families.

They have heard there's a new
symphony which has been written

by the famous Beethoven,
so Beethoven is here,

he conducts the symphony,

and you hear some sounds
which never before have been heard.

The Eroica is a new kind
of a symphony.

We have recorded the Eroica here
and, when you sit here

as one of the 100 audience here,

you feel the music just attack
your body.

You just feel it under your skin.

We have to think about the halls
and the acoustics

where this music was done.

The rooms were about
100 square metres,

so if you put the 38 musicians there
and play the Eroica,

it's very loud music.

It's like...

It's comparable to when
we go to a rock concert.

Your body is moved by the sound.

If you wanted to have
the same sound expression in, say,

a modern concert hall
like Berlin Philharmonic,

you would need more than
1,000 musicians

to get the same impression.

People are just totally disturbed
by the fact

how loud this music is.

How the music wouldn't end,

but also how harsh the attacks are,
how dissonant the music is.

One of the aristocrats that was
listening to this first performance,

he said, "A Haydn symphony
would be over by now."

I mean, it was just going on
forever for them.

If I wrote a symphony an hour long,
it would be found short enough.

If you fancy you can injure me,
you are very much mistaken.

They were fascinated by the extremes
and by the bizarrerie of his music.

That's a word they used a lot.
"It's bizarre what he's doing."

And they love it.

APPLAUSE

The student Ries, when he was
writing a publisher to introduce it,

simply said, "I believe
when this work is premiered,

"heaven and earth will tremble."

Now, you didn't say things like that
about a Haydn symphony.

Or even a Mozart symphony.

You did not say heaven and earth
were going to tremble.

MUSIC: Symphony No. 3, Eroica
by Beethoven

Napoleon has just proclaimed
himself Emperor.

He'd seen Napoleon as liberating
Europe from tyranny

and now he's going to become
a tyrant himself,

and so Beethoven
is absolutely furious.

So, he too is nothing more
than an ordinary man.

Now, he will also trample
all human rights underfoot

and only pander to his own ambition.

He will place himself above
everyone else and become a tyrant.

According to Ferdinand Ries,
Beethoven grabs the front page

of his symphony,
the autograph score,

tears it in half
from top to bottom.

There was a manuscript copy,

which Beethoven was about to
use for a performance,

and it says, "Grand symphony
entitled Bonaparte",

and Beethoven scores out
the name of Napoleon so heavily

that there's actually
a hole in the paper.

Any kind of tyranny,
Beethoven is strongly opposed to.

Beethoven needs to mourn
all of the idols,

all of the heroes that
he had put up on a pedestal.

But, of course, they're just human.

You know, Beethoven starts to
search for the spiritual hero,

I think, and maybe it's the hero
that's within.

MUSIC: Sonata No. 23, Appassionata
by Beethoven

The myth of Beethoven is that
he was beyond subservience

and he was too independent,

did not need patrons
and all that sort of thing,

but, in fact, he depends
on them very much.

Beethoven is a freelancer.

That means he has to piece together
a living

from composing and performing

and teaching and patrons,

and one of those patrons
is Lichnowsky,

who gives him a really very generous
yearly stipend of 600 florins.

And that's great, until Beethoven
is visiting out in the country

in Lichnowsky's palace, and there
are some French officers visiting,

who were occupying Vienna
at the time,

they're Napoleon's soldiers,

and Lichnowsky says,
"I want you to play for them",

and Beethoven says, "I will not
play for our country's enemies."

So Beethoven flees the palace
after their argument,

carrying the manuscript
of the Appassionata,

which got wet and smeared
in the rainstorm.

He gets home,
he has a bust of Lichnowsky,

he smashes it on the floor,

and that's the end
of Lichnowsky's stipend,

which was about a third
of his income,

and that's what Beethoven
was capable of then,

but he never did that again
with a patron.

The legend says that,
after this episode,

Beethoven goes to Lichnowsky
and says...

Prince, what you are,
you are by birth.

What I am, I made myself.

There will be many thousands
of princes,

there is only one Beethoven.

Did he actually say that?
We don't really know.

Could he have said that?
Yes, absolutely.

And, of course, he was right.

RUMBLING SOUND

Some of these things
that we think of now

as just part of Beethoven's
personality,

the things that make him difficult
to deal with on a personal level,

are really products
of his hearing loss.

The dawning on Beethoven
that he was no longer

going to be able to conceal it

was a soul-shattering experience
for him.

This is a letter
that Stephan von Breuning,

who had been living with Beethoven
at the time,

wrote in 1804 to Franz Wegeler,

who hadn't seen Beethoven
in maybe half a dozen years.

"You would not believe,
dear Wegeler,

"what an indescribable and,
I should say, truly dreadful impact

"the loss of his hearing
has had on him.

"Imagine the feeling
of being unhappy

"and with such a vehement nature
as his.

"Add to this his shyness, distrust,
often of his best friends,

"and general indecisiveness."

BASS DRUM REVERBERATES

In my situation, I find I spend
a lot of time on my own

because I need to clear things out,
I need to just listen to myself,

because you can get bombarded
with other things

that affect other things that you
do - and therefore your mood.

BASS DRUM REVERBERATES

So you do become more isolated,
really, because you don't

want to be in crowds, you don't
want to be with other people,

so I feel that everything is...

..very targeted, almost.

Anything that he does is for himself
and his own exploration.

I think, with deafness,
everything becomes focused,

so, if I speak with you,
I am speaking with you,

I'm not also listening
to something else

or being distracted
by something else.

Yes, I may see other things, and
that is part of my hearing world,

but you are the most important
thing in my life right now.

Or, if I'm striking this bass drum,

this is the most important thing
in my life.

So that's the kind of focus that
often you'll find with deaf people.

BASS DRUM REVERBERATES

Well, what we usually hear
about Beethoven

is that he was this bizarre type

who was not very well
communicating with society,

so I do think that this is
one of the many sources

that gives us an idea of how...

How much he actually was involved
with the people around him.

"Beethoven very much enjoyed
looking at women.

"Lovely, youthful faces,
particularly pleased him.

"If we passed a girl who could
boast her share of charms,

"he would turn around, look at her
sharply through his glass,

"then laugh or grin when he realised
I was watching him.

"He was very frequently in love,
but usually only for a short time."

It's fair to say that Beethoven
always falls in love

with the same type of woman.

It means beautiful...

..young,

aristocratic

and with love for music.

In the summer of 1804,

Beethoven visits
Charlotte von Brunsvik in Hietzing.

He knows the family von Brunsvik
since many years.

On that occasion, he meets
her sister, Josephine, again.

She just lost her husband
with pneumonia

and she's pregnant
with her fourth child.

When they can't see each other,
they exchange letters,

where the wording
is very, very touching.

I mean, both of them write that...

Beethoven writes that Josephine
is the only person

that understands him,
and vice versa.

"Dear, kind Beethoven,
according to my promise,

"you are receiving a report from me
on the first post day

"after my arrival.

"How are you? What are you doing?

"These questions occupy me
rather often. Very often."

We know that there is
this letter exchange

between Josephine and Ludwig and...

..we know that they love each other
and this is...

The myth rather has him alone.

November 1804.

By now, he's courting her
in earnest.

Courting her as a composer,
he presents her with a song,

An die Hoffnung - "To Hope".

# Ob ein Gott sei? #

Josephine's sisters,
they like Beethoven as she does,

but they think it's too dangerous
for her,

not to be with him,
but to marry him.

There is a letter by Therese,
by her sister, saying,

"She has had a dreadful
nervous breakdown.

"Sometimes she laughed,
sometimes wept,

"after which came utter fatigue
and exhaustion."

This relationship with Josephine
is totally different

to all the relationships he had
with other women before.

He really hopes she will help him

to fulfil the mission of his life.

Long, long, of long duration
may our love become,

for it is so noble,

so firmly founded upon
mutual regard and friendship.

Oh, you,

you make me hope that your heart
will long beat for me.

Mine can only cease to beat for you

when it no longer beats.

Josephine's response to Beethoven
is polite but firm.

"You have long had my heart,
dear Beethoven.

"If this assurance can give you joy,

"then receive it
from the poorest heart.

"Do not tear my heart apart,
do not try to persuade me further.

"I love you inexpressibly,
as one gentle soul does another.

"Are you not capable
of this covenant?

"I am not receptive to other forms
of love for the present."

She knows that she won't
be able to marry him,

because there is a question
of she being a noble person

and him being a bourgeois person,
that obviously it's allowed

to be in contact with each other,
but you're not allowed to marry.

I mean, she would lose her
noble connections with that.

She would be a persona non grata
if she did that.

I am convinced that they,
that they loved each other,

but they can't find a way to
really lead their life together.

In 1805, she writes
with an air of finality.

"I love you and value
your moral character.

"You have shown much love
and kindness to me and my children.

"I shall never forget that
and, as long as I live,

"I shall constantly take interest
in your destiny

"and contribute what I can do
to your success."

In the autumn, she leaves Vienna
for Budapest

as the French Army approaches.

As a coda to the affair,

Beethoven writes Josephine
a final letter

full of sadness.

I thank you for wishing
still to appear

as if I were not altogether
banished from your memory.

You want me to tell you how I am?

A more difficult question
could not be put to me.

And I prefer to leave it unanswered

rather than to answer it
too truthfully.

It's really clear to me why Ludwig
falls in love with these women

that he can't really reach.

He's lost his mother, the one woman
that truly loved him,

and he, in some ways,
wants to bring her back,

and he goes after
these impossible women

who, socially and financially,

are out of his league.

It's just not realistic.

I mean, he could have found a woman.

It's not so difficult

to find somebody you can relate to
and you can love

and you can build a life with.

Beethoven is apparently not able
to relate to the real women

that are around and that would be...

..that would be willing
and, erm, and attractive enough

to find his extremely giftedness

and his...

..extremeness in his personality
attractive enough

to fall in love with it.

Now Ludwig is 35 years of age
and he's still single,

despite so many attempts
at finding love,

and just reeling from one
catastrophic attempt to another.

And if you look at how things have
been throughout most of his life

to date, he is kind of
just repeating himself.

But what is changing is his music,

because it's just growing
and developing

and, you know, it seems that
every time he finds himself

back in this stage
where he's single again

and lost the love of his life...

..he gives us another piece
of glorious music.

That part of him is maturing
and not going wrong,

because that is the area
that he truly does have control

and where he brings joy,

emotion and absolute fulfilment

to anyone who plays
or listens to his music.

If we need an example of what
Beethoven is capable of in his art,

as distinct from the frequent
wretchedness of his life,

there's 1806.

In 1806,

he has just gone through
the Josephine disappointment,

which was terrible for him.

He does a massive revision
of Fidelio,

which collapses because he has
a fight with the manager.

He has fevers that go on for months,

he has an infected finger,
that near loses the finger,

so his life is a shambles.

And in that year,
he writes Symphony No. 4,

he begins Symphony No. 5
and he writes the Violin Concerto,

and he writes the three
Rasumovsky quartets

that revolutionise that genre
and set the course in some ways

of string quartets for the next
50 years, and that is 1806.

And every one of those

are among the greatest examples
of their genre.

Count Rasumovsky is the Russian
Ambassador in Vienna,

he's a great enthusiast,

he loves playing the violin.

He plays Haydn string quartets,
he's obsessed with Beethoven,

he commissions him to write
three quartets.

He imagines at first himself as
a player in these, in these works,

but, then, when it becomes clear
how difficult the music is,

he decides that he'll have a quartet
in residence at his palace

and he himself won't play,
he will just employ the players.

Beethoven was reflecting the extreme
turbulence of the times,

with the Napoleonic Wars

and Austria and Russia had recently
had this horrible defeat

at the Battle of Austerlitz
at the hands of Napoleon.

There were wounded Austrian
and Russian soldiers

in the streets of Vienna.

People perhaps expected their music
to be a relief from those events,

to be something more contained,
more manageable,

and, instead, Beethoven
is reflecting humanity

at its most complex
and its most tragic.

The emotion is also raw because of
Beethoven's personal circumstances.

I mean, it was only back in 1802
that he was suicidal

about his deafness.

He didn't want anyone
to know about it.

And then we see this
very dramatic shift,

out of which the middle period
music comes

and, particularly with this
59 No. 3...

..he writes on a sketch leaf,

"Let your deafness no longer
be a secret, not even in art,"

and it's a very defiant statement.

You see the joy
in the Rasumovsky quartets.

There's something
that is not easily won.

It comes out of the suffering
and it's that much more powerful.

It can't sound easy,

it needs to sound like it's joy
achieved at a price.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Forget about the music,
about the human being,

he is able to find
some inner strength

that maybe he didn't
even know he had

and hang onto that and look inward

and go to, I think,
a place in his soul

that many of us never experience.

From this despair,

he becomes so incredibly prolific,

it's almost as though
the ideas are coming faster

than he can write them down,
faster than he can digest them,

and he changes the course of music.

Everything changes
because of Beethoven.

MUSIC: Symphony No. 6, Pastorale
by Beethoven

There's this wonderful date
of December 22nd, 1808,

two days before Christmas,

and Beethoven wants to perform

most of his new composed pieces.

Beethoven composed so much music,
symphonic music,

in that three, four years
before 1808,

that he had the feeling
he has to present to the audience

all what he has written
or composed new.

The concert starts with
Symphony No. 6, Pastorale.

And it's followed by a song,
which is Ah! perfido,

and then some excerpts
of his new Mass,

and then there was an intermission
and, after the intermission,

Beethoven performs himself
on the piano

his Piano Concerto No. 4.

Followed by, again,
part of his new Mass,

and then he performed
Symphony No. 5.

MUSIC: Symphony No. 5
by Beethoven

The first bars is "Ba-da-da-da",

so it's very strong music,
and people said,

"Oh, my God, that is not
baroque music any more."

It starts with these
famous few notes

and the first movement
is wild and dark

and driven and passionate.

Beethoven invented the journey
from hell to paradise

in his Fifth Symphony.

Music shows that
there is a possibility

of coming out of tragedy
and arrive to jubilation.

By listening to the Fifth Symphony,

if you are in trouble,
you end up feeling good.

It's a medicine.

It's a pill you have to swallow.

He even had only one rehearsal
for a four hours concert

and, therefore, the quality
of the concert was very, very low.

It was wintertime in Vienna

and they couldn't really heat
the theatre as much as it was needed

and therefore the audience found

it's too cold
to listen to a concert.

The people left and said,
"Oh, my God, what was that concert?"

I run the theatre 200 years later
and I did exactly the programme,

and, for God's sake,
it was rehearsed properly,

it was high quality,

and my audience not only gave
a big, big, big applause

after four hours,
but have been very satisfied.

That is the difference
between 1808 and 2008.

Beethoven stands between
two generations.

With one foot, he is firmly grounded

in the Mozart generation,

who were the generation
of the Enlightenment.

Beethoven lived in the same period
as Goethe lived,

who was the prototype
of Enlightenment.

Beethoven, with his other part
of his profile,

was a member
of the new Romantic age.

What is Romanticism?

Romanticism is expression
of feelings,

and Beethoven was the person
who actually moved music

out of the Enlightenment
into Romanticism.

Andreas Streicher, a piano maker,

he has a concert room
in his factory

and, in this concert room,
he wants to have a lot of busts

of famous musicians and, as he's
a friend of Beethoven's, he asks,

"Shouldn't we make a bust of you?"

And, for the bust,
he needs a plaster mask

of the face of Beethoven.

From this mask, they make this bust,

so we know that,
from the proportions,

this is the face of Beethoven,
and this is very moving, I think.

Beethoven was a very
life-loving guy,

somebody who make jokes
with his friends,

but, when they produce
the plaster mask,

they put straws in his nose
so that he could breathe

and everything else was plaster,

and Beethoven is very angry when
he gets the plaster on his face

because it doesn't feel very good.

This is why we have
this grim expression,

this stressed expression
on his face.

This bust will become very famous
as an image of Beethoven

and this is why we always think
Beethoven

is the grim, titanic guy.

What underlies his creation
is love towards humanity.

Maybe not towards particular people.

We know that he could be angry
at certain people,

but love towards humanity
in general,

and this is something which
lends most of his music

this uplifting quality.

Beethoven writes the
Fifth Piano Concerto in 1809

while Vienna is being bombarded
by French artillery.

MUSIC: Piano Concerto No. 5
by Beethoven

Beethoven is horrified.

He sees nothing but misery
and squalor on the streets,

which he writes about
to his friends.

Since May 4th, I have produced
very little coherent work.

At most, a fragment here and there.

The whole course of events
has affected my body and soul.

What a disturbing,
wild life around me.

Nothing but drums, cannons, men,

misery of all sorts.

He's hiding in a basement
during the bombardments,

trying desperately to protect
the last vestiges of his hearing

from the impact
of the shells falling...

..and, during this time,
he writes what would become

one of his best-known pieces,

one which shows
great resilience of spirit.

It is music
which is entirely uplifting,

it is music which is so energetic.

MUSIC: Piano Concerto No. 5
by Beethoven

I think this is one of the reasons
why his music

finds such universal
appeal and love,

because people from
all around the world

can relate to this basic
feeling of hope -

and not just hope, but certainty
in a much better future.

Beethoven can express emotions
in music

in a way that you can never
quite do it in words.

One of Beethoven's pupils
is Dorothea Ertmann,

who is a very fine pianist indeed,

one of the best pianists
at the time,

and she has a child who,
unfortunately,

dies at the age of only three.

According to
Dorothea's recollections,

Beethoven comes and visits her
and he just sits down at the piano

and plays to her
without saying a word.

He just improvises, extemporises,
plays for goodness knows how long.

He just played.

And, then, just left
without saying a word.

That was his consolation,
his way of comforting her.

And, apparently,
she was moved very strongly

and is very grateful to him.

"Who could describe this music?

"One thought they heard
choirs of angels

"which celebrated the entry of my
poor child into the world of light.

"Then, as he finished,

"he pressed my hand
with a heavy heart

"and left just as silently
as he had come."

Beethoven is a person
that is capable to engage

with people around him.

He is alert to their feelings,

who is empathetic, who listens,

who tries to compose his music
in a way

so that it's meaningful
to the people around him.

People so often say,
"Words fail me on this occasion",

and Beethoven probably
felt the same.

Words fail you when you are
trying to comfort someone

who has just lost a child
or a father.

And, so, by playing music,
that sort of comforts

in a way that words can't, and so
he gets the emotion in the music

in a way that one can never
quite do the same with words,

so he's actually inspiring
her in that way.

MUSIC: Sonata No. 27 in E minor,
Op. 90 by Beethoven

Beethoven decides to go
to the spas in Bohemia

in order to recover from feeling
unwell, and it's a terrible journey.

It's been pouring with rain,
the road is virtually bottomless,

it's sunk in mud,

and the coach driver has managed
to get the coach through.

And, so, while he's still in bed,
he writes this letter

to the woman who is now known
as the "immortal beloved".

My angel, my all, my self...

..only a few words today.

In fact, with pencil. With yours.

Can our love exist
but by sacrifices,

by not demanding everything?

Can you change it,

that you are not completely mine,
I am not completely yours?

Oh, God, look upon beautiful nature
and calm yourself over what must be.

It's 1812,
Beethoven is now 41 years of age,

and all attempts at a relationship
have been a disaster.

He's been in and out of love
for as long as we can remember

and he has written this incredible,

beautiful love letter to somebody

that has played into...

..his myth.

While still in bed,
my thoughts surge towards you,

my immortal beloved,

now joyfully,
then again sorrowfully,

waiting to know
whether fate will hear us.

I must live with you entirely
or not at all.

You can see the ending
of that letter here on the page

is almost ecstatic in the writing.

It's flailing around and almost
out of control on the page

as his feelings are almost
out of control.

Be calm, love me.

Today, yesterday, what a tearful
desire to be with you.

You.

My life, my all.

Farewell.

Oh, never cease to love me,

never misguide the most faithful
heart of your beloved.

Eternally yours, eternally mine...

..eternally ours.

L.

The point of this letter
seems to be that

they can't be together now.

Between the lines,
there's a certain suspicion,

a certain intimation that maybe
they never can be together.

It's so touching in its wording,

it's really a love letter
in the best sense,

but, at the same time,
it's so mysterious.

I mean, we still don't really
know who the woman was.

The candidates are Amelie Brentano,

she was an unhappily married woman
to a businessman

who was a friend of Beethoven's.

Were they carrying on
a backstairs romance?

That doesn't seem very likely.

Another is Bettina Brentano, who
had wanted to be a muse to genius,

but she was about to be married
to a poet.

Josephine Deym, who he had
written letters to,

but, as far as we know,
he hadn't seen her for years

and she was nowhere in the vicinity.

This is a very interesting
piece of writing.

He imagines a situation
with somebody he loves

in a very vivid way.

In the letter itself,
he puts in a movie scene

an image of how he wants to
be with a woman

and how he wants to be as a person.

He's giving his inner feelings

an immediate,
not very formed expression.

He imagines himself as being in the
place where he always wanted to be.

Beethoven is apparently
not able to relate

to the real women that are around.

There have been women who
fell in love with this special,

you know, crazy man,
but what a craziness.

But he couldn't work it out

because he had, again, I think,

because he had such
an overinflated idea of himself

that he couldn't make the step
from the ideal, worked out

"I want to be this",

to the not-so-ideal
"but I can't have that."

The wording of this love letter
to the Immortal Beloved

is very near to the earlier letters
Beethoven exchanged with Josephine.

I actually think, due to the work
of especially female researchers,

erm, we by now can be 90% sure

that Josephine
is the Immortal Beloved.

There's no postal marks
or anything on it,

which makes me think it almost
certainly wasn't sent.

I'm pretty sure that Beethoven,
having written the letter,

felt that that was almost
the end of the story.

He'd declared his love
in a letter,

he was going to keep that as
a permanent memento of the woman,

a permanent record of his love,

his love was all poured out
into the letter,

and in the same way that
the Heiligenstadt Testament

was a kind of ceremonial burial
of his emotional feelings

over his deafness,
his suffering and grief,

here is a ceremonial burial
of his love for the woman.

I wonder if this is a wake-up moment
for him - a moment of realisation.

He's in some way resigned to the
fact that, if he can't have her,

that's it.
He's put everything into it,

he cannot find another ounce
of himself.

He doesn't feel he's worth it
any more.

In 1812, two weeks after
the Immortal Beloved letter...

..he gets a letter from a young girl
who's a piano player.

She sends him a wallet
that she made herself.

Your wallet will be treasured
among other tokens of regard

which several people
have expressed for me,

but which I'm still
far from deserving.

Do not rob Handel, Haydn and Mozart
of their laurel wreaths.

They are entitled to theirs,
but I am not yet entitled to one.

Is his humility false there?

Not exactly.

But, again, he's depressed,

and he's being kind as he could be.

He's also being honest
in saying something that

I think any honest artist says,

"I'm not where I thought I would be,
I'm not where I want to be.

"I have a sense
that I haven't reached

"what I've been reaching for."

I think every honest artist
feels that

and this is one of the few times
when Beethoven

is ready to say that,
to a young girl.

Only art and science can raise men
to the level of gods.

The true artist has no pride.

He sees, unfortunately,
that art has no limits.

He has a vague awareness of how far
he is from reaching his goal.

The aftermath of the Immortal
Beloved affair you see play out

over the next couple of years
of his life.

He's in a bad state,
perhaps drinking heavily.

A friend who visits him
in this period says,

"I will refrain from describing
the state he was in."

And he begins keeping a diary
in this period

and this is one of the entries
in the diary.

Oh, terrible circumstances
which do not suppress

my longing for domesticity,
but prevent its realisation.

Oh, God, God, look down upon
the unhappy Beethoven.

Do not let it continue
like this any longer.

When the implications of all this
settled in -

that he was not going to have the
love that he had always wanted,

he was not going to have the family
that he always wanted,

he was going to have to live
for himself and his art only.

You must not be human,

not for yourself, only for others.

For you, there can be
no more happiness

except within yourself, in your art.

Oh, God, give me the strength
to conquer myself.

Nothing must bind me to this life.

All is ruined.

You have to be lonely
in order to be an all-embracing

great personality,
like Beethoven was.

If you are not lonely,
if you have a partner, a wife,

a husband, a friend,

it's a little more difficult
because your energy

is focused on one or a few people.

If you are completely lonely,
then something opens up in you

and you can embrace the whole world.

So I think Beethoven has this...

..painful love in him

that he is alone,

he's deaf, the world is shut out,

so he feels love for the whole world
and he can express that.

As soon as I approach Beethoven,

suddenly, it's almost as though
you're being hurtled

into somebody's innermost pain

and innermost love and joy
all at the same time.

He's trapped in this world
inside his own head

because he doesn't hear
what's going on mostly around him,

and then he gives us
the Seventh Symphony.

What do you do if you've got
something blocking your ears?

You ask somebody to speak louder
to you because you can't hear them.

If they're going to hear his music,
they're going to hear his music.

He's crying out his pain as well,

because his most excruciating
chords and dissonances

are the moments of the most volume.

Is a composer allowed to be wild?

And Beethoven said, "Yes, I am.

"If you like it or not,
I'm wild and my music is wild."

The Seventh Symphony
picks up an idea

which seems to be fashionable -

the repetitive rhythm.

A certain rhythmic pattern,

and this goes on and on and on.

RECITES RHYTHMIC PATTERN

And in no other composition
is it as extreme

as in the Seventh Symphony,

which is like an orgy
of this rhythmic pattern.

It goes on and on and on
in a completely

and almost boringly repetitive way.

Mozart would have...

..probably must have hated it,
would he be alive,

but, for the time,
this was the new great idea.

It is a drug. It excites us.

And this excitement is something
the new composer wants,

but the old people thought
it was dangerous or devilish.

Beethoven wants to excite us

with this repeated, repeated rhythm,

and this is
the Seventh Symphony's power.

MUSIC: Symphony No. 7
by Beethoven

There may be people who have
great taste and say,

"Come on, Beethoven,
this is impossible.

"How can you write, about 700 times,
the same rhythmic pattern?"

And then he says,
"This is exactly what I do

"and it will excite people
and they will love it."

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I think it's the beginning of
this incredibly rich, internal,

imaginative life,

so that he starts hearing in ways
that we can't imagine.

CHOIR SINGS GLORIA
FROM MISSA SOLEMNIS

Forget the world, OK?
I can't hear that.

Now I'm going to hear music
from heaven.

# Amen... #

I'm going to hear music from hell.

I'm going to hear music
that no-one else can hear.

# Jesu Christe... #

And then he shares that with us
and this is the revolution for me.

# In excelsis Deo

# Gloria, gloria, in excelsis Deo

# Gloria

# Gloria, gloria
Gloria, gloria

# In excelsis Deo

# Gloria, gloria

# Gloria. #

1817, Beethoven is 46.

He's famous, his music is
played at home and abroad.

METRONOME CLICKS

And he needs indications
for conductors and performers

in the other parts of the world to
play and perform his music.

Suddenly he has this device which
allows him to be the first composer

to indicate exactly how fast and how
slow his pieces should be performed.

THEY SING

"The metronome marks will
follow soon.

"Do not fail to wait for them."

MUSIC CONTINUES

"In our century, things of this
kind are certainly needed.

"Performers must now obey the ideas
of the unfettered genius."

The last decade of his life was
so painful on so many levels.

I mean, besides losing his hearing,
he was embroiled in this

lengthy court battle to take
custody of his nephew.

He was starving, I think,
for connection,

personal connection, physical
connection with other human beings.

METRONOME CLICKS

We might see this also as
the attempt of an ageing composer

to keep control of things.

Control of his music, with
the device of the metronome,

control of his financial situation

because Beethoven couldn't get any
fees any more as a performer.

Control of his personal life.

I think it's the beginning of this
incredibly rich internal

imaginative life so that he starts

hearing in ways that we
can't imagine.

"Forget the world, OK, I can't hear
that. Now I'm going to hear...

"..I'm going to hear music
from heaven.

"I'm going to hear music from hell.

"I'm going to hear music that
no-one else can hear."

And then he shares that with us,
and this is the revolution for me.

Beethoven changes the course of
music for all times.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

His concert in December, 1813,

is one of the big society events of
contemporary Vienna.

First performance of the
Seventh Symphony.

After four years without a new
symphony, this is the time

where the people expecting

the utmost of this great composer.

The concert of December eighth,
1813, remember,

is a benefit for soldiers
wounded in battle.

And the mood of Vienna and Europe
at this point is really kind of

exultant because Napoleon
is going down.

It's clear that he's near the end.

And there's a kind of celebratory
quality to the Seventh Symphony

that absolutely plays into the
spirit of the time.

In that same concert was the
premiere of Wellington's Victory,

which is cashing in on the spirit
of the time!

Probably the most commercial thing
he ever wrote, celebrating

the victory of the Napoleonic wars
over Napoleon.

I always felt that Beethoven,
at the end of that concert,

he made a lot of money.

Pocketed the money with
a kind of grin about how

he had this marvellous success
with a bad piece

and a really nice success with
a good piece.

HE CHUCKLES

This is the moment just after
Wellington's Victory has

become an international hit

and turned Beethoven into not

just a well-regarded composer,
but a local celebrity.

This is Beethoven's most shining
moment in public.

Amid all of the euphoria,
we see that in tandem

with his deafness on the one hand,
his increasing isolation,

that this really just constricts his
world even more.

He goes more inside of himself.

MUFFLED RUMBLE

Beethoven really experiences
two episodes of acute

depression during his lifetime.

Clearly, around the time of the

Heiligenstadt Testament, he suffered

a major depressive crisis.

And then, again, in the 1810s, as
the extent of his hearing loss

and the finality of it
begins to sink in,

he realises now that he may be
becoming completely deaf.

What these episodes have in common
is they shake his sense of who

he is as a musician.

"Can I keep doing this?"

This is when he rewrites Fidelio

and he elaborates even further on
that dungeon scene,

and makes it even more expressive
and intense than it was before.

The beginning of the second act,

the scene opens on the character

of Florestan deep underground,
in a dungeon, in the dark.

TENOR SINGS

TRANSLATION:

His very first words, he says...
HE SPEAKS GERMAN

.."How dark it is here."

But then he goes on to
express the sense

that, in the springtime
of his life, at a time

when he should have been able to
expect happiness and fulfilment,

everything has been taken
away from him.

He is sat alone,
he is in solitary confinement.

I don't think it's too
much of a stretch to say that

Florestan, in the dungeon, in
solitary confinement,

lamenting his isolation,
his failure to be able to realise

the dreams that he
had as a young man,

this is perhaps the most
autobiographical

moment of all of Beethoven's music.

HE SINGS

MUFFLED RUMBLE

Beethoven is 44.

He's aware of his faculties
going, his most important

faculty of hearing.

And the more he loses control of
that, the more

he tries to go control of anything
else he can get his hands on

and, of course,
the first thing is his family.

As the head of a family,
you never lose that

sense of responsibility
and it continues.

So Beethoven is well established in
Vienna now.

Both of his brothers are living
in the vicinity.

He meddles in Johann's relationships
cos he wants to advise him

who he should marry.

Karl has helped him with getting his
music out, as well,

with his publications,

and Beethoven is paying his
medical costs.

So he's kind of lording it,
in a way.

STRING INSTRUMENTS

In early November, 1815, Beethoven
learns that his brother Karl

is dying of tuberculosis,
which is the choking,

bleeding horror that they
watched their mother die from.

He rushes to Karl's bedside, but
he is already obsessed with the idea

that he must get guardianship and
complete control of their son, Karl.

Beethoven believes the mother,
Johanna, is absolute evil.

He has to get Karl away from her
because she will corrupt him.

When you read the documents of all
this story,

he's not a really nice guy

and he uses a lot of different
names for the mother -

the most used is Queen of the Night.

So he never names her with her name,
but gives her nicknames

and most of them
are rather ugly ones.

"Last night, that Queen of the Night
was at the artists' ball until 3am,

"exposing not only her mantle,
but also her bodily nakedness.

"It was whispered that she was

"willing to sell herself for
20 gulden.

"Oh, horrible. Oh, horrible."

It had something to do with power
and control.

I don't like this wife and she's
not able to raise a child,

but Beethoven wasn't much more able
to raise a child, of course.

In his opinion, he's the only one.
He's always the only one.

It's not very nice, this story.

Beethoven devotes more energy then
one might reasonably

expect to the attempt to gain
custody of Karl.

I suspect that what is going on
during this time is that

Beethoven is seeking to repeat
the pattern that played out

in his own family as a child.

PIANO CONTINUES

His father placed a great deal of
expectation on Ludwig to be

essentially a second Mozart

and Beethoven is perhaps hoping that
Karl can do the same thing.

"You regard Karl as your own child.

"Heed no gossip, no pettiness,
in comparison with this sacred goal.

"He's my son. I am his true father."

DRAMATIC MUSIC

The court that should decide the
question of the guardianship

is the Landrecht

and the Landrecht is a court for
noblemen only.

And at that point the court asks,
"Ludwig, are you a nobleman?"

And Ludwig says,
"Yes, of course I am

"because my name is van Beethoven

"and the van is an indication of
nobility."

In fact, that's not true.

The van is just a part of a typical
name from northern Europe.

Von is an indication of nobility
in Germany and Austria.

Von with an O, not van with an A,

as in Beethoven's name.

And so the court says,
"You are van Beethoven,

"but you are not a nobleman."

"My nature shows that I do not
belong amongst this plebeian mass.

"Since I have raised my nephew
into a higher category,

"neither he nor I belong with
the commoner's court.

"But only innkeepers,

"cobblers and tailors come under
that kind of guardianship."

I mean, his life is a series of not
getting what he wanted.

It starts with not being the
highborn personality that he

wanted himself to be

and he fabricated quite
a lot of bogus round this story.

He had a tendency of wanting to be

bigger, greater,

nobler - bracket - narcissistically
driven - bracket,

um, in all what he did.

The magistrat in Vienna decides to

make Johanna van Beethoven
co-guardian

of her son - Karl van Beethoven Jr.

Ludwig van Beethoven
doesn't like that decision

and he appeals to the next court.

The next higher court decides
that Ludwig gets

guardianship for his nephew,
but not the sole guardianship,

but co-guardianship with
a friend of his.

That's the final decision.

It's an aspect of Beethoven that
I don't like to know about,

but in a way doesn't surprise me
when I think about how he...

He's kind of re-enacting something
that he's familiar with.

It's the one moment in his life

when he thinks everything else
is lost to him.

He's clearly not
going to find a wife,

he's clearly going to remain
childless

and yet he sees a child left without
a father and feels that

sense of responsibility, that it's
his job to raise that child,

it was his job to father his brother
when their mother died,

and so it seems natural for him
to want to do that.

But the way he goes about it,
by trying to smash

everything around that's been young
Karl's infrastructure up until then.

i think it's a really brutal
trait,

almost, with his inner set-up.

He wants so much to be somebody
different that he doesn't

shrink away from making another
wife's son his son in order

to have at least that,
at least a prodigy for himself.

"You have to be my son,
you have to be a musician,

"you have to follow the line.

"Grandfather, father, me,
the utmost genius, and now you.

"I'm such a genius I can skip
reality

"and make him my son in a real
sense."

And that's the programme.

GENTLE SINGING

His compositions slows down.

He goes into a period of deep
reflection.

And in the year 1817 he composes
nothing at all,

until the final months of the year.

SINGING CONTINUES

One of the first pieces that he
writes, actually,

after this long fallow period, is
this beautiful song, Resignation.

SINGING CONTINUES

The song Resignation is very easily
compared to the entry in his

diary about resignation, about
resigning yourself to your fate.

"Resignation. The most sincere
resignation to your fate.

"Only this can make you capable
of the sacrifices which your duty

"and vocation demands.

"O hard struggle,
thus in spite of it all,

"you must win through by defiance.

"Be absolutely true
to your constant conviction."

In the song, you have this curious
imagery of a light,

a candle, that's being snuffed out,

but it's a soliloquy and speaking
to the candle.

"Candle, you have to snuff out
your light."

SINGING CONTINUES

It's a very, very pessimistic poem,

but what Beethoven does with it
is incredible because he

messes around with the repetitions
of the text.

And the final statement,
"Let out your light,"

Beethoven is saying here, "You have
two let loose of what's been

"holding you back,
but this is OK."

SINGING CONTINUES

"Let me live, even by means of
artificial aids.

"If only such are to be found.

"If possible, develop the ear
instruments then travel.

"This you owe to yourself,
to man and to Him, the Almighty."

SOFT FIZZING

MUFFLED RUMBLE

For the last ten years of his life,
starting in 1818,

we have the so-called conversation
books,

which means that visitors that
come to see him write down whatever

they want to talk with him about

cos his hearing loss was so hard by
the time that he just couldn't

understand any more what they would
say, so they had to write down

all the things they want to
tell him.

And the interesting thing about this
is we see how many different

people come to see him,

and they talk with him about all
sorts of things -

about politics, what's advertised
in town, about music also.

"They drag terribly. In the aria,
I am following the singer,

"the overture to chorus line
confused the violin and cello."

"I still remember the problem you
had with the timpanist

"at the rehearsal of Egmont."

"I think that, when constructing
a sound machine, one must

"consult not merely a musician,
but a well-rounded physicist.

"Therefore, an acoustician."

Unfortunately, we don't have his
answers because he speaks

with them, but still we get a very
strong sense of a man who...

..still in his last year's of
living, is very much tied to

what's on in society.

This is one of the restaurants
Beethoven frequents regularly,

either alone or with friends.

We know of that because he writes
about it in his conversation books.

In his later years, he's 47.
Beethoven is always a writer.

He is a writer of his own ideas,
in little books.

Advertisement in coffee house
in Landstrasse.

"Meals, 60 guldens.
Salary, 25 guldens.

"Wine, 42 guilders.

"All together, 127.

"Yearly, 1,524 florins guldens."

So he writes down his income.

I think this conversation book shows
that even a composer of his standing

had to have a daily life,

and he had to fight for his daily
food,

meals and we can see Beethoven,
here, is a guy who

suffers from his illness,

but who still overcomes it with lots
of energy.

Beethoven says, when he's writing to
the publisher, he says,

"What is difficult is good" -

and I think he means
that on several levels.

He means, what is
difficult for a performer,

what is difficult to compose
and what is difficult in one's life

in terms of challenges and dealing
with sorrow, dealing with suffering.

So, in 1818, Beethoven has
more freedom,

he is getting back into what
we call the final period,

the extraordinary flowering of the
late music.

So, the story of the
Diabelli Variations is that

Diabelli sends out this rather silly

waltz that he composed to

most of the composers of the day,

asking them to contribute one
variation,

and he wanted to publish
the whole set together.

PIANO CONTINUES

Beethoven, of course,
refuses to do that,

ends up writing 33 variations
of his own,

and in the process creates perhaps

the greatest piano piece ever
written.

It takes the best part of an hour to
play, there's nowhere it doesn't go,

there's nowhere he doesn't take us,

and it's the most incredible journey
in the entire piano repertoire.

I mean, how many composers would
have thought of turning

the accompaniment, the repeated
chords, at least the top line

of those repeated chords,
into the subject of a fugue,

as he does in the penultimate
variation?

So, in the waltz, you have...

HE PLAYS WALTZ

HE REPEATS NOTE

And, of course, the theme in the
fugue is...

HE REPEATS HIGHER NOTE

But the sheer bloody mindedness of
it, you know, to have this...

HE PLAYS REPEATED NOTE

..as a theme, I can't imagine any
other composer doing that.

I mean, the bloody mindedness of

Beethoven isn't to be
underestimated.

You know, for instance, I'm
thinking of some of the variations

where he leaves you in the most
sublime place...

..and then completely just knocks
everything down,

you know, just destroys everything.

So Variation 20, which is pretty
much the halfway point of the set,

finishes up like this...

HE PLAYS QUIETLY AND SLOWLY

HE PLAYS ENERGETICALLY AND LOUDLY

It's complete insanity.
It's the writing of a madman.

I mean, he's not,
but you could believe that!

MUSIC: The Barber of Seville
by Rossini

In 1822, there is a Rossini craze
going on in Vienna.

Rossini is 30 at this point,
he's the hot young voice in opera.

He is also an admirer of Beethoven,

so he's brought to Beethoven for
a visit.

Beethoven is 51 at this point.

Two things amaze Rossini -

one is the squalor that Beethoven is
living in

and the other is how warm
Beethoven is to him.

So in this period, in 1822,
when the world considers him

half crazy and deaf and finished as
a composer,

and he hasn't written a symphony in
a long time,

he's in the middle of the
Missa Solemnis,

the most ambitious piece of
his life.

With the Missa, he found a new kind

of sacred music that basically
was symphonic.

SINGING

# Kyrie... #

THEY SING

# Kyrie... #

The Missa Solemnis is one of the two
big mass compositions by Beethoven.

The fact is that his patron
and long-time friend

and student, Archduke Rudolph,

is appointed Archbishop of Olomouc.

In January 1819, Beethoven
instantly writes to him.

"The day on which a high mass
composed by myself will be

"performed at the ceremonies
for your Imperial Highness will be

"the greatest day of my life."

Beethoven was convinced that the
afterlife is a place

you can long for, a piece of rest,

a bit of solitude, a piece
you don't have to be scared of.

SINGING CONTINUES

So having the occasion to compose
a religious work was certainly

attached also to the idea that he
can see it is a very good

investment to ensure
a place in heaven.

"My chief aim was to awaken
and permanently instil religious

"feelings, not only into the
singers,

"but also into the listeners."

# Gloria in excelsis Deo

# Gloria in excelsis Deo... #

Apparently, Beethoven is convinced
that between man on Earth

and this transcendence figure
in heaven there is no connection.

So, what he does is he composes
music that symbolises God,

or transcendent,
and then he does very abrupt cuts

and then there is this Earthly
music.

For example, a wonderful sequence is
in the Gloria of the Missa Solemnis.

Right at the beginning, the text is,
"Gloria in excelsis Deo,"

and it goes up and up and up,
and it's rushing up,

and then it goes up
and goes up and goes up,

and it stops abruptly.

# Et in terra... #

And then it's very soft,
very low, pianissimo,

and it says, "Et in terra pax,"
which is "peace on Earth" -

and there is really
no connection in-between.

"I have the more
turned my gaze upwards,

"but for our own sakes,
and for others,

"we are obliged to
turn our attention sometimes

"to lower things. This too is
a part of human destiny."

Around this time, when Beethoven
is working on the Missa Solemnis,

he feels that he's in bad shape
financially.

When he finally is close to
finishing the Missa Solemnis,

he begins to approach publishers

with it and he absolutely promises

a row of publishers this piece
and he begins some double dealings

and triple
and quadruple dealings sometimes.

The seemingly vicious way in which

Beethoven is selling
his Missa Solemnis

has damaged his reputation

as a composer and as a human being.

The problem with Beethoven

is that we have to accept that
nobody

has the monopoly of being
a sacred man.

Being a normal man with
catastrophes in life,

with bad moments, with...

..with awful behaviour,

then, in the same time,

make the most sublime masterpieces.

But, in my opinion,
it's more than this.

What he wants is to get confirmation

that this is the best work
he ever wrote.

Friends of Beethoven,

they ask one of the most
famous portrait

painters of the time,
Karl Joseph Stieler,

to paint a portrait of Beethoven
and Beethoven hates being painted.

Beethoven decides that he wants
to have a music

manuscript on the portrait
and not any music manuscript,

but his most important work,
the Missa Solemnis.

This is not to present him
in the real way he looked,

but in the way of genius,

so we have this red scarf
on his neck

and we have trees in the background.

This is a very romantic,
English way of seeing a genius.

And we have this look to the sky,

where...the genius comes from.

He has some split in his
personality, in his inner feeling,

in the way he thinks of himself,
really a split.

One side is dealing with the world
and doing his art and being a genius

and everything, and the other part
is not dealing with the reality.

I mean, really not dealing.

I think this brutality and
materialistic approach to a human

being, like in this long going story
with the nephew, does shed

a light on how he deals with people.

As Karl gets older,
the relationship deteriorates.

They begin, basically, to
drive each other crazy.

Karl is torn between Beethoven's
sometimes smothering affection

and episodes of just total neglect.

Beethoven hits him, ridicules him,
condemns him and then smothers him.

The letter of September 14th, 1825.

"This Sunday, you need not come,

"for, with your behaviour,
we shall never establish

"true agreement and harmony.

"Farewell, he who, it is true,
did not give you life,

"but certainly maintained it
and undertook the education

"of your mind paternally,
more than paternally,

"now implores you to keep to
the only true way of goodness

"and righteousness.

"Farewell."

He simply feels the boy is slipping
away from him,

slipping out of his control,
and slipping into

what he fears is the immorality

and the fundamental evil
of his mother.

That he's falling into her orbit and
becoming her son rather than his.

Beethoven writes to Karl...

"God as my witness. I dream only
of one thing - to be entirely rid

"of you and this wretched brother
of mine and this abominable family,

"which has been foisted upon me.

"May God grant my wishes, for
never again shall I be capable

"of suffering on your account.

"Unfortunately, your father -
or rather not your father."

The point is that Karl at this
point is in his late teens.

He's a young man, he is behaving
like a teenager.

He's doing what boys do.

Maybe he's drinking too much
sometimes.

Maybe he's gambling a little bit.

He's not a bad kid at all,

but Beethoven simply can't handle
it because... I think it's partly

that Beethoven is a man who is
used - as an artist -

used to having everything absolutely
under his control.

He has absolute control of the page

and now he wants to have absolute
control of Karl because he doesn't

understand the independence
of other people.

This complicated story with
the nephew and his lifestyle,

which is so wide and problematic
and...disgusting in a way,

probably I would run away,
be scared of him.

As a person, I find Beethoven
strange and scary and...

Yes, I feel sorry for him,

but the music is a huge
gift to humanity.

What he did, he gave us
a fantastic present.

In the spring of 1825,
Beethoven is very ill.

He's very aware of his mortality

and his doctors recommend

that he goes to the spa resort

of Baden to recover.

He writes this letter
to his doctor and invents

a little fictional dialogue.

"Doctor: How are you, patient?

"Patient: We are not in a
good state.

"Still very weak. Belching, etc.

"My catarrhal condition
has the following symptoms here...

"I cough up rather a lot of blood,

"probably only from the windpipe,

"but it does flow out of my nose
more often.

"As far as I know, my
constitution - I should say

"my faculties - will scarcely
recover unaided."

In the Thanksgiving movement,
we get a sense of Beethoven's

insignificance, and also the fact
that he wishes for a release

from his own preoccupations,
whether they be the failure

of his body or the failure
of his relationship

with his nephew, Karl.

In the sketchbook, he jots
down an idea for new strength

and that becomes the form for this
extraordinary slow movement,

the Heiliger Dankgesang.

It's very interesting because that's

a specific autobiographical link

between Beethoven's life situation

and the music that he writes.

I think the late quartets
are...they're transcendental.

It's really music as a
philosophy of life.

It's beyond music.

This blew me away, and that
combined, I think, especially

with the silences in the
late quartets,

they're so breathtaking

and so risky

that it's just, it's beyond belief.

One of the things that's the most
moving to me about the late quartets

is that here is a guy who's
extraordinarily isolated

in his own life, his own social
life, from his deafness,

from his inability really to
maintain relationships,

creating this ideal series of
conversations between four players.

So he is creating the circumstances
by which we can have wonderful

relationships within a string
quartet, those very relationships

that he himself doesn't have.

There's a kind of unpleasant irony
here that a lot of people have noted

that, at the same time Beethoven
as writing this sublime music,

he is not doing the potentially
sublime job of fathering Karl.

He is largely ignoring Karl.

MUSIC: Grosse Fuge In B Flat Major,
Op.133 by Beethoven

Karl, I think, reaches the point
in 1826 where he decides

he cannot go on in this manner.
Something has to change.

Karl climbs up to Castle Waldstein,
near where I am standing.

It's a rather arduous climb,

he clearly had to nerve himself
up to making this,

and he pulls out a pistol.

Attempts to shoot himself
in the head.

The first time, he misses entirely.

The second time, he grazes his skull
and inflicts a wound.

"Most honoured Dr Smetana,

"a great calamity has occurred,

"accidentally inflicted
by Karl upon himself.

"There is hope that he may
be saved, especially by you,

"if only you'll come soon.

"Karl has a bullet in his head.

"How, you will learn in time.

"Only hurry.
For God's sake, hurry."

It's clear Karl is trying
to send a distress signal.

He's not so much trying to kill
himself as just trying to indicate,

"I don't know what else to do
with my life right now.

"This is hopeless."

He did certainly succeed in sending
that message - whether Beethoven

was capable of receiving it or not
is another question.

In late September, 1826, Beethoven
arrives here in Gneixendorf

with his nephew, with Karl,

for what he thinks
will be a short stay.

His main purpose is to convince his
brother to leave his considerable

estate to Karl rather than
to his wife, Johann's wife,

whom Beethoven hates.

He ends up staying here three months
because it also turns out

that it's a way for Karl
to get away from Vienna,

where he could be arrested
for trying to kill himself,

and a chance for his wound to heal.

And Beethoven simply starts
composing at this table,

in this music room.

At this point, his body
is falling apart.

His world is falling apart.

He's losing his nephew
by his own ideals.

He's fighting with his brother.

And here he completes the
F minor quartet,

his last string quartet
completed, Opus 135.

Whenever we play the slow movement
of this piece,

it's on my mind that that's the
backdrop to the writing

of 135 - Beethoven and his
relationship with Karl.

There's a tremendous darkness,
particularly in the middle section,

where time seems to stop
and you can really sort of feel

Beethoven just in a state
of numb shock.

Early December, in effect,
his rage, his temper

is finally going to prove
the end of him.

He has another fight
with his brother Johann.

He does not really want to be here,

he does not really want to deal
with his brother

and his brother's hated wife at all.

He says, "I'm leaving."

And Johann says, "Look, the only way
you're going to get back to Vienna

"at this point is an open cart."

And Beethoven in a fury
says, "That's what I'll do,"

and that was the end of him.

It was two days' travel in the
middle of winter in an open cart.

And this begins his decline.

He's feeling so unwell he
takes to his bed straight away,

summons the doctor and some
friends come round.

And this is when he composes
his last completed composition.

It's a little canon, which says,

"Wir irren allesamt
nur jeder irret anders."

And that means, "We all make
mistakes, but everyone makes them
quite differently,"

which is very appropriate, really.

"I still adhere to the motto,
'Not a day without a line.'

"And if I let the muse sleep, it
is only so that she may be all the

"stronger when she awakes.

"I hope to give birth to a
few more great works

"and then to conclude my Earthly
course among good people,

"like a child grown old in years."

Beethoven is in his death bed,

though it takes a long time for
death to get him.

Karl leaves for the military
in January,

they have a chilly farewell,
and Karl never sees him again.

It's all just wretched.

The last things that we know of that
Beethoven said - he's lying

in his death bed in a coma
most of the time...

He's asked at some point for
Rhine wine and it was not coming,

it was not coming, and finally
it arrives. The bottles

are sitting on the table next
to his bed and he opens up

and they say, "Look, the wine
finally came!"

And he says, "Pity. Too late."

And then lapses back into a
coma and never wakes up.

METRONOME CLICKS

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

Just before 6pm, March 26th,
1827, Beethoven dies.

He's been lying there for weeks,
turning into a legend and a myth,

and that myth and legend, a romantic
myth, is overtaking the reality

of his life as a man and a musician.

The stories about his death are two.

One is his brother Johann
said, "He died in my arms."

The other is that there was
a storm raging outside

and there was a huge clap
of thunder,

and Beethoven sat bolt upright
from his coma, shook his fist

at the sky and sat back dead.

That is the ultimate romantic
genius death.

And who knows?
It could even have happened.

So, when he's finally left us,

the autopsy takes place and it
comes as no surprise, really,

that the insides of his body

is pretty much devastated.

He suffered from stomach problems
throughout his life

and they found that the insides
of his ears were just decimated.

But the main cause of his death was
the cirrhosis of the liver.

MUSIC: 3. Adagio

So the funeral is fixed for
three days later,

that's the 29th of March.

And an enormous number of people
turn out.

It was estimated that 18,000
people are there,

coming to follow
the funeral procession.

To have a procession like that,
you might expect that for an emperor

or a king, but for a commoner
like Beethoven - as he was -

is quite extraordinary,
so he's really regarded

as the equivalent of
a king of music.

Beethoven is buried like
an aristocrat, which he had always

claimed to be in a moral
and ethical way.

The funeral oration is given
to Franz Grillparzer, the leading

Austrian playwright of his
generation, and he wants

to capture something for the ages

and, in his oration, he does.

"We stand weeping beside the
tattered strings of the
silent instrument.

"Art - great sister of both
goodness and truth,

"consoler of the suffering -
he held fast to thee.

"Because he shut himself
off from the world,

"they called him malevolent.

"And because he avoided sentiment,
they called him unfeeling.

"He withdrew from men after he had
given everything

"and received nothing in return.

"He was alone because he could
find no second self."

Grillparzer, in effect,
sends Beethoven off into eternity

bearing the burden
of his achievement,

bearing the burden of his myth

that fuels the 19th century
in so many ways

and stands as a beacon and a threat

and a challenge to everybody
who followed him.

The contradictions in his life
are enfolded in his music in a way

that is unique to him, that he seems
to speak for all of us.

And he is speaking for our highs
and our lows

and our joys and our sorrows,
and all those sorts of things

that art is supposed to do.

He does in such a powerful and
overwhelming way because he felt

it all, and he felt it in his life
and he felt it in his work.

He's one of the first
who has displayed his full life

and feelings through his music.

Life was not just a straight road
from...you take your lessons, you

go through this, that and the other.
His was all over the place,

but his humanity came even
more to the forefront.

And we have seen all sides
of a man,

a person, a life,
in all its brutal honesty.

Beethoven comes
into the Napoleonic age.

He has to deal with not only
the social disruptions but also

the personal disruptions
that come with every life.

So he is the bourgeois individual
that becomes a genius, and he fits

in with everything that is put
into that pot of being a genius.

Being able to live the genius
part of yourself

and not to repress it
has a high cost.

You really make yourself free,

but not because you want to -
but because you have to.

And Beethoven is so fascinating

because nobody else did it
in such a radical way.

# Freude
# Freude

# Freude, schoner Gotterfunken,
Tochter... #

"Vienna, December 20th, 1822."

"My dear Ries, I have been
so overburdened

"with work that I am only now
able to reply to your letter.

"I accept with pleasure the proposal
to write a new symphony

"for the Philharmonic Society
of London.

"For Beethoven, thank God,
can write,

"if he can do nothing in
the world besides."

# Deine Zauber binden wieder

# Was die Mode streng geteilt

# Alle Menschen werden Bruder

# Wo dein sanfter Flugel weilt... #

I remember, when I was young,
I wanted to change the world,

and Beethoven is somebody
who managed to change the world.

By the 9 Symphony,

Beethoven comes to the point
where he needs something

more radical, more drastic.

He wants the human voice
to enter the symphony.

He lets singers to suddenly
infiltrate the orchestra

and turns the form of a symphony
upside down

by adding chorals and soloists
to it.

He actually, with this simple break,

throwing away the symphony
as a form

and entering a simple,
almost pop melody,

as the great moment of a symphony

created democracy itself.

And this is your melody,
and all of us take part

in the choral symphony.
We all jump up and sing.

Beethoven is the composer
of the human soul.

Beethoven is our composer.

APPLAUSE