Original subtitles

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