display
Well, we'll soon be behind us.
Symphonists can play other symphonies, pianists other sonatas.
We no longer have to show pictures of the grouchy titans, no longer hear about deafness and its consequences.
And fate, which knocks on the door always and everywhere, can finally heal his gouty ankles.
Until maybe seven years from now, then it's Beethoven year again, then all the hype starts all over again and this time in front of an audience.
One would think that if there is a classical composer besides Mozart whose life the fee-financed German television, downright enthusiastic about finally being able to fulfill his educational mandate, filmed with the greatest willingness, it would be Beethoven.
Niki Stein thought that too.
display
He is one of the leading German television directors and scriptwriters.
He knows what the medium can do, what you can do with the medium and how you have to deal with the editorial offices and directors so that you can do that too.
Beethoven in three physical states: Anselm Bresgott, Tobias Moretti and Colin Pütz (from left to right)
Source: ARD Degeto / WDR / ORF / EIKON Media / T
He dealt with Beethoven for twenty years.
He really wanted to put that into a film.
So he had an idea.
For a long time he knocked on the stations almost as tragically in vain as fate on the gate.
“Beethoven!” Was the legend, sighed.
Nobody knows him anymore.
What you have to explain there.
A Rex Gildo biopic would likely have been brought through the boards more easily.
Beethoven fits in perfectly with this time
display
But we don't want to get upset.
It went well again.
“Louis van Beethoven”, Stein's two-hour excursion through the becoming artist and man of the politically and musically possibly most important composer of the West, arrives on time for his 200th birthday and fits in perfectly with the time.
He's also daring.
Stein circles Beethoven's life from the edge, from the beginning in Bonn to 1787 and from shortly before the end in his brother's house near Krems, leaving out the center, the actual titan years, the intoxication, the success.
Almost all the cliché faux pas, in which Beethoven's celebrity filmmakers almost inevitably end up (and they are legion), are left untrodden.
He didn't care that the soundtrack (early piano sonatas, late string quartets, large fugue) would not achieve any Helene Fischer sales without smash hits, without a fifth, almost without a ninth.
It was about freedom and truth.
A figure that is more relevant today than it has been for a long time.
display
We are at the electoral court in Bonn.
One speaks Rhenish in the Beethoven family.
The father wants to turn Louis, the veritable child prodigy, into a virtuoso prince monkey in Mozartian style.
But soon he doesn't want that anymore.
With him, the genius is infected by the freedom virus: Sabin Tambrea as Tobias Pfeiffer and Colin Pütz as Louis van Beethoven
Source: ARD Degeto / WDR / ORF / EIKON Media / Z
In the theater, in the artists' pub, he got infected by the spirit of freedom and the struggle for equality and independence.
Soon, as small as it is, it will be too big for Bonn.
He has seen the consequences of this freedom fever, that you can lose your existence for it, maybe your life, but he burns for it.
And he knows what he is worth, knows that he never wants to become so financially driven and burned out like the other genius of his time, to whom he was apprenticed in 1787 - Mozart.
It has not been proven whether Louis even met the adult Wolferl.
That he was his copyist for “Don Giovanni” is almost impossible.
Of the princely piano duel between the 16-year-old and the 31-year-old who was inspired by the “Figaro” success, actually almost fatally ill, we would have been guaranteed to have known, if it had taken place as with Stein.
However, it has now been invented so nicely that it - not only that Stein shares "Louis" with "The Crown" - seems pretty true.
Like the rest of the film, it breathes a high degree of authenticity.
The Beethoven's rooms are appropriately miserable.
The rooms of the nobility under construction.
The baroque theater in Český Krumlov on the Vltava is a great double for the Bonn court theater.
The right fortepiano for every time
Everything seems so tight that Anselm Bresgott, as a juvenile Beethoven, always has to offend with his rowing arm and thought movements.
display
The music - recorded in the respective room during the shoot - sounds more authentic than ever before in a classical biopic.
Precisely fitting piano replicas were provided for each episode time.
The 13-year-old Colin Pütz (the very young Louis), an excellent pianist, actually plays what you see.
Tobias Moretti doesn't have to do any of this anymore, he sits in the drawing room, listens to Schuppanzigh's string quartet.
Appropriately grouchy and complex: Tobias Moretti is the old Beethoven
Source: ARD Degeto / WDR / ORF / EIKON Media / T
How that might have sounded in Beethoven's head is perfectly suggested.
How you listen to music while reading it can be seen from the rapidly flashing faces and the rustling of the scores in the speakers.
The incomprehensible, puzzling nature of this music for Beethoven's contemporaries then and for most of his contemporaries today becomes understandable.
Everything relevant takes place - the love, the women, none of whom wanted to follow him into his world, the nephew Karl, whom Beethoven almost drove into suicide in his infernal love affair, the alcoholism (the wine bottle is Moretti's constant companion).
Also the misery of the dependent musician existence, the money haggling, the plans for a tithe in C minor, sold extremely dearly to London, the sociopathic, desperate, the misunderstood, the imprisonment in oneself and one's fate.
Afterwards nobody can say that he didn't know this Beethoven.
And nobody is allowed to sigh anymore.
By January 2027.
Louis van Beethoven: ARD Mediathek, on December 25th 8:15 pm on linear television.