DAY 33 SATURDAY 24th OCTOBER, PERTH, AUSTRALIA



Three reviews I picked up today and read over my cup of tea:

THE AUSTRALIAN – EVAN WILLIAMS
24 OCTOBER 2009
Beethoven’s Unfinished Symphony
In Search of Beethoven (G)
3 stars
Limited national release
IT can only be coincidence, but two of the films I reviewed recently in these pages both contained excerpts from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. And very different films they were: Departures, that deeply moving idyll of love and death from Japan, and the Hollywood sci-fi thriller Surrogates, whose credits refer to a Beethoven "song" (though I must have missed it at the time).

But is it such a coincidence? I've seen a list of more than 200 films with Beethoven on the soundtrack. There are the famous ones: Disney's Fantasia, Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (the Ninth again), and Copying Beethoven, Agnieszka Holland's partly fictionalised account of the composer's last years. According to my reliable internet source, Beethoven also popped up briefly on the soundtracks of Sex in the City, Hellboy II: The Golden Army and The Assassination of Richard Nixon, and can be heard, would you believe, in Drag Me to Hell, a horror film on current release. What the great man would have made of all this is anyone's guess, but he would have relished the royalties.

Biopics of the great composers used to be standard Hollywood fare: Cornel Wilde doing his consumptive Chopin bit in A Song to Remember (that splash of blood on the keyboard after some crashing chords), Brahms (in the person of Robert Walker) eyeing Clara Schumann in Song of Love, Dirk Bogarde doing his best Lizst impersonation in Song Without End, playing the piano in a way that reminded one wag at the time of someone washing his socks. The last big-name actor to play Chopin was Hugh Grant in the 1991 Impromptu. And the last to play Beethoven in a major biopic was the inscrutable Gary Oldman, in Immortal Beloved (1994).

To this growing filmography we can now add Phil Grabsky's documentary In Search of Beethoven, a brave attempt to come to grips with the composer's anguished life. It is a meticulous work: ambitious, lucid, sensitive, visually handsome and supported by a host of interviews with musical authorities. And, it shouldn't surprise us, it never quite gets the measure of its subject. What film could? But nor, I fear, does it live up to the large claims made for it. According to the producers, In Search of Beethoven "delves beyond the familiar image of the tortured, cantankerous, unhinged personality to reveal a surprising and completely creative genius".

Really? We all know Beethoven was a surprising and creative genius, so I'm not exactly sure what is being revealed. The popular notion of Beethoven as a "heroic, tormented figure battling to overcome his tragic fate" is described in the film's production notes as a "romantic myth". If so, it is exactly the romantic myth that the film perpetuates. It is true that we are given glimpses of another side of Beethoven, but they hardly amount to an alternative theory of personality. Experts line up to tell us that he was jealous of Haydn and Mozart, determined, in a seemingly egotistical way, to overshadow them. He was also a man of some personal vanity - fond of good food and wine, fastidious in his dress - not qualities we associate with distracted genius. According to Grabsky, he liked to cut a fashionable figure in Viennese social circles. An amusing story is told that soon after moving into rented quarters in Vienna, he took a stonemason to his room upstairs and, without consulting his outraged landlord, smashed a hole through the outer wall to improve the view. He would have been at home in Sydney's real estate market.

Grabsky made that splendid documentary In Search of Mozart in 2006, and it was a model of its kind, with well-chosen musical excerpts and readings from Mozart's letters. We are asked to believe that his Beethoven film is challenging accepted wisdom, but nothing in it disturbs our impression of a tragic figure cruelly used by fate.

The suicidal outpourings in the so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, written in 1802, when Beethoven's deafness was well advanced, are movingly recounted. "In my profession it is a terrible hardship," Beethoven wrote of his deafness a year earlier, in what seems now like a masterpiece of understatement. Today his deafness would almost certainly be curable, and I have always thought of it as the worst and most bitterly ironic affliction ever visited on a human being. But perhaps it was a necessary spur to that sublime creativity.

Suffering drove Beethoven to despair, and nastiness. And if anything he was a nastier man than the film would have us believe. I have a much-loved copy of Alexander Thayer's monumental biography of the composer, published in 1866 (and in Henry Krehbiel's English edition, in 1921). The three volumes were the gift of a dear friend, and there is nothing of consequence in Grabsky's film that they hadn't already told me. In Thayer's estimation, Beethoven was a self-hater. When his mother died, his father took to drink; and even before his deafness he was plagued by recurring illness. So a good deal of ill-tempered bitterness would have been natural in him. Thayer despised other traits: Beethoven's snobbery, his meanness in money matters. But what can account for the insane fury he showed towards his family?

Yet he gave the world those great, unalterable sounds, those imperishable insights into a world of suffering, beauty and spirituality to be found, I think, in no other music. Genius is all too often flawed (don't mention Wagner), and the greater our admiration for the genius the greater our reluctance to acknowledge the flaws. In Search of Beethoven is at heart a cautious film, despite its pretensions. It prefers the genius to the monster, and so do we all.

But what might have been a great documentary turns out to be merely a good and serviceable one. It lacks fire, daring, and originality. There are too many snippets of music, too many talking heads, too little to define that great arc of the composer's life and spiritual development. But no one who cares about the man and his music will miss it. For that I give credit to its subject. The search goes on.

THE HERALD SUN – 24 OCTOBER 2009
In Search of Beethoven (G) Director: Phil Grabsky (In Search of Mozart) Starring: Juliet Stephenson (narrator), Roger Norrington, Helene Grimaud, Emmanuel Ax, Jonathan Biss. Rating:
**** Found behind a wall of sound
Anyone who looked at the title above and immediately envisaged the hunt for a slobbering St. Bernard can go and stand in the corner for the rest of the review.

No, the stately chase promised by this polished documentary tracks the life and legacy of the late German composer Ludwig van Beethoven.

As he did with Mozart a while back, British filmmaker Phil Grabsky is playing detective with classical music history here.

Dispensing with all the clichéd claptrap and generalisations that inevitably plague movies like this, Grabsky successfully reassesses and revitalises the imposing reputation of his subject.

Simply by staying sensible, and sticking to the facts. The prim narration of actor Juliet Stephenson draws liberally from the composer’s own correspondence.

Elsewhere, the film throws open the doors and invites in a wide diversity of opinions and reflections from a cavalcade of experts, boffins and plonkers.

They all know their stuff, and better still, they all know how to express themselves in a way that allows the music of Beethoven to come alive in a whole new way.

As the film proceeds, novice viewers will also get a fascinating overview of how Beethoven’s unusual blend of gut instinct and unorthodox work techniques set him apart from his strait-laced contemporaries.

The musical performances through the film are exemplary, concluding with a brilliant rendition of the timeless Ninth Symphony by conductor Franz Bruggen and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century.


THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW
25/10/09
BY Peter Crayford
Two good actors have played him before. Gary Oldman in Immortal Beloved and Ed Harris in Copying Beethoven. Neither captured the man or entirely rescued him from numerous black and white melodramas. But Phil Grabsky’s documentary IN SEARCH OF BEETHOVEN is one of the best films about a musician I have seen.
He interviews a select group of erudite and articulate musicians, critics and musicologists and each has something interesting, unpretentious and memorable to say.
Musical performances illustrate the interviews. Thankfully free of period dramatisations, it lets the music do most of the speaking through formidable recordings.
This documentary gets somewhere close to the mystery that is creativity

So….did I find anything or not? Well, I think you have to be pretty confident in your knowledge of Beethoven to suggest the film offers nothing new..but each to their own. That slightly mixed review in the Australian was still on a whole page and with a photo – all the other films barely got a paragraph. So that is fantastic!

When I turned up at the cinema, they are in a bit of a fuss: so many people have turned up that they have to swap from the 160- to the 260-seater! The place is crammed. Young and old. What a great way to finish the Australian tour. The cinema has a glitch transferring the film from the hard-drive of one cinema to the other – so ironically I do a 20-minute stand-up about the film, explaining why you could not have made this film without modern technology…while, meanwhile, the cinema struggled to get their modern technology to work! They did, however, and we had a really good screening and Q&A to follow. 3 rounds of applause: 2 more and they’d have called the police! (You need to watch the film to understand that joke…).