CLASSICAL
Beethoven film blends music, biography
Sometimes, when fielding audience questions after screenings of “In Search of Beethoven,” Phil Grabsky lets it slip that an early cut of his 2009 documentary stretched to 11½ hours long.
“People have come up to me after and said, ‘Where can we get the 11½-hour version?’ ” marvels the award-winning British filmmaker from his home base in Brighton, East Sussex. “I said ‘No, no, that doesn’t exist; it was a moment.’ ”
Showing this weekend and next at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, “In Search of Beethoven” is a nuanced and insightful cinematic portrait of the great composer, who was born 250 years ago this year. Through 65 live performances and more than 100 interviews, Grabsky and his crew show just how deeply Beethoven’s music and his often messy daily life were intertwined. The music is sublime; at times, the camera zooms in close enough to see the pianists’ manicures.
“The more I listened, and I think the more the audience has the opportunity to listen to his music, just the more extraordinary it is that a human being — a human mammal — can write this,” Grabsky says.
Beethoven was brilliant and ambitious, aiming to eclipse the two composers he grew up admiring — Mozart and Franz Josef Haydn. (The latter was also his mentor for a time.) The price he paid was considerable: He was profoundly unlucky in love, with a propensity to fall for both his piano students and aristocratic women with whom he didn’t stand a chance.
He also lived at a time of incredible historical tumult, as the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte, to whom he nearly dedicated his Symphony No. 3 — scratching the self-proclaimed emperor’s name off the work’s title page at the last minute — ran amok across central Europe. During the French army’s 1809-10 siege and occupation of Vienna, Beethoven hid out in his brother’s basement, using pillows to shield his ears from the roaring cannons.
From at least his early 20s on, the inexorable loss of his hearing left Beethoven embittered and, from time to time, suicidal. He was also arrogant, rude, slovenly, and perhaps the worst tenant in Viennese history; while composing, he had a habit of banging a stick on the floor of his apartment in time to the music. He bullied his nephew, Karl, after winning a brutal custody battle with his brother’s widow.
And yet Beethoven’s admirers have long since run out of words to describe how his music expresses humanity’s noblest impulses and loftiest ideals. Fortunately, Grabsky’s interviewees are more eloquent than most.
“His music is so firmly rooted in everything human, with all of its frailties and weaknesses and shortcomings of all sorts,” says pianist Hélène Grimaud in the film. “But at the same time, there’s an element of Promethean struggle and of an attempt to always reach higher and to never give up and never surrender — something that always tries to elevate itself from the difficulties or the misery inherent to the human condition.”
She goes on, as the camera pans over her translucent performance of the adagio movement of Beethoven’s fifth (or “Emperor”) piano concerto.
“That’s also what’s so fascinating to me, is that he’s perceived often as a sort of misanthropic character, but his music is also the music of an inveterate optimist, of someone who never gives up in thinking that men can be better,” Grimaud adds.
“IN SEARCH OF BEETHOVEN” FEATURES 65 LIVE PERFORMANCES.
What to omit?
“In Search of Beethoven” is the second of four composer documentaries — alongside Mozart (the first), Haydn and Chopin — made by Grabsky’s Seventh Art Productions. As with the others, the high volume of personal correspondence Beethoven generated helped the director dispel the composer’s widespread caricature as the prototypical difficult artist.
“As you read the letters, you know that your perception of Beethoven as a kind of misogynist, miserable man actually is misplaced,” says Grabsky. “There are elements of that at times, but actually, he is much more complicated. In his letters there was plenty of examples of love, humor … naughtiness, and absolute passion for music.”
The dozens of performers, conductors, historians and musicologists Grabsky spoke with are only too happy to open up. Emanuel Ax, who recently joined the Houston Symphony for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, speculates that some of the innovations in the composer’s work may have stemmed from his abnormally large hands. According to Sir Roger Norrington, seen conducting the Salzburg Camerata on the Piano Concerto No. 2, “Mozart was writing for Saturday; Beethoven was beginning to write for eternity.”
Logging the most time onscreen is probably the Cambridge-based Endellion String Quartet, who Grabsky brought in to perform some of Beethoven’s final compositions — which, the director notes, “could only have been written by a man with seriously impaired hearing, because he’s only being influenced by what’s in his head now, not what he can hear.” (He was so taken with these works that, two years later, Grabsky called Endellion back for a separate film, “The Endellion String Quartet Play Beethoven.”)
In whittling down that tantalizing 11½-hour cut to a more manageable 140 minutes, Grabsky not only had the unenviable task of deciding which Beethoven pieces to leave out of the film — he swears there’s only one or two most people might miss — but he had to contend with interviewees who told him, “I agree to talk about X, but you also need to talk about Y.” Equally vexing, he notes, was “if you film an entire symphony, what’s the two minutes that you put in the film?”
Even with something that couldn’t possibly be left out, as in the Ninth Symphony, other issues arose.
Namely, “there were some production difficulties on the night” of filming with the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century and maestro Frans Brüggen, Grabsky says.
“I knew that my tape was going to run out just as the concert was running out; in the end it was like 15 seconds after they finished that my tape ran out,” he adds. “All sorts of stressy things (happened), and yet I captured a really great performance.”
Second film
Looking back on the documentary a decade after its release, “I’ve made about 300 films, I’d say,” Grabsky estimates. “But ‘In Search of Beethoven’ is absolutely one of my top three favorite films that I’ve made. And largely that’s down to the personality of Beethoven and the personality of the music.”
One of Grabsky’s latest films, “Leonardo: The Works,” also screens at MFAH this month. Part of Seventh Art’s Exhibition On Screen series, the film is the first feature-length, high-definition examination of the Renaissance master’s complete painting oeuvre, including “The Last Supper,” “Virgin of the Rocks,” “Lady With an Ermine” and, of course, “The Mona Lisa.” (The soundtrack, featuring such 15th- and 16thcentury composers as Guillaume Dufay, Thomas Tallis and Marco Dall’Aquila, is also magnificent.)
Despite their differing disciplines and eras, Grabsky says he sees many similarities between Leonardo and Beethoven.
“We’re living in a tweet culture, as you know so well, and what Leonardo and Beethoven were encouraging people to do was just pay attention (and) be curious, because we are unbelievably fortunate to live in this world,” he offers. “We should appreciate it. That’s a message that has as much importance now as it ever has.”