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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 # 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