Original subtitles

(joyful classical music)

- [Man] If we had to pick

10 things that are great about humanity,

there would probably be

several Beethoven works amongst them.

- [Man] Where does Beethoven rank

in the history of western music?

And I suppose there I would say,

Beethoven is one of the gods.

- [Man] It's been famously said

that in a sense he's defined

what music means, what music is.

- [Man] I would definitely say that Beethoven

is the greatest composer who ever lived.

- [Woman] His music is so firmly rooted

in everything human,

with all of its frailties

and weaknesses and shortcomings.

He's perceived often as a misanthropic character,

but his music is also the music of an inveterate optimist,

of someone who never gives up in thinking

that man can be better.

(dramatic classical music)

- [Juliet] Winter, 1825.

At his home in Vienna,

the world's greatest composer is writing

what will be one of his last works,

his Opus Number 133.

Some call it in comprehensible,

the work of a lunatic.

Others acclaim yet another masterpiece

in an extraordinary life.

A life that begins in obscurity,

here beside the Rhine in the German town of Bonn.

(bells ringing)

In the middle of December, 1770,

in a top floor bedroom,

Bonn gained a new inhabitant.

Ludwig van Beethoven was the first child to survive infancy

of Johann and Maria van Beethoven.

Little is known if his parents.

No portraits exist.

It seems his mother was mild mannered,

while his father was stern.

Both Johann, and his father before him,

were court musicians.

The same path was laid out for Ludwig.

At age seven, he gave his first public concert.

His father taught him at first,

then saw the need to employ more skilled teachers.

- One of Beethoven's teachers in Bonn

was Christian Gottlob Neefe.

If I take a little bit from a sonata,

this is probably the sort of music

that Beethoven had to learn as a student.

- [Juliet] Neefe, who was court organist,

made his promising student, his assistant.

The young boy played this keyboard for hours on end,

and at 13, wrote a piano concerto.

- It's extremely virtuoso.

There's almost too much piano in it.

The piano just goes up and down and up and down,

in thirds, in octaves.

This is typically a piece where he was

showing off his pianistic abilities.

If I just concentrate on playing, I can do it.

It's almost unpleasant to play.

It's amazing that he could write it,

but it's much more amazing that he could play it.

- Beethoven, like Mozart as a boy,

would be able to sit down and improvise.

He could,

his friends would no doubt say,

play as a love song,

and he would make up a love song.

Play us a battle, a battle he would play.

He would write a battle.

Play us a storm.

He would write a storm.

I think I'll use that later in my symphony number six.

- Bonn was a rather cultivated place.

Successive electors of Bonn

had encouraged music and philosophy,

and various other pursuits of the time.

When Beethoven was 14,

a new elector arrived, Maximilian Franz,

who believed in the new philosophical ideas

and was also extremely musical.

- [Juliet] Bonn's nobles took their lead

from this new elector,

who was both their Archbishop and Prince.

Under his enlightened rule,

musical life flourished.

(speaking in foreign language)

(dramatic orchestral music)

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Juliet] Other details of his youth are vague.

What is known, is that Beethoven secured a post

playing viola in the court orchestra,

performing works by the two greatest composers of the age.

The first was Wolfgang Mozart,

born in Salzburg, but now living in Vienna.

In his short lifetime, Mozart composed over 650 works,

including 27 piano concertos

and 41 orchestral symphonies.

(dramatic orchestral music)

The second was Joseph Haydn, also in Vienna,

and just as prolific as Mozart.

These were the giants Beethoven looked up to.

- By his mid-teens Beethoven was considered to be

a prodigy of potentially Mozartian proportions.

And the next step for

a young musician in his situation

would have been to travel to the center

of German musical culture, that is Vienna,

to meet with, and hopefully study with the best masters,

in this case, Mozart himself.

So in 1787, Beethoven did travel to Vienna

and legend has it that he met with Mozart.

But in fact, there's no evidence that he did.

The historical record is in fact blank on this.

And regardless, after two weeks,

Beethoven was forced to return home to Bonn,

as his mother had become seriously ill.

- [Ludwig] Dear Doctor von Schadan,

She died, after enduring great pain and agony.

Who was happier than I

when I could still utter the sweet name of mother,

and it was heard and answered?

I am unhappy.

I've been plagued with asthma and melancholia.

- [Juliet] Beethoven's young sister died soon after,

and the fortune of the family, the widowed father,

Ludwig and his two younger brothers, declined.

It seems Beethoven's father took to drink.

The teenaged Beethoven took it upon himself

to become head of the household.

In 1792, fortune favored Beethoven.

While traveling through Bonn,

Haydn breakfasted in this dance hall.

Beethoven introduced himself,

and handed him the score of a recent work.

Haydn was impressed, so impressed he offered

to tutor Beethoven at his home in Vienna.

The elector granted permission

for his employee, Beethoven, to leave.

And in November, 1792,

Beethoven, age 21, arrived once again in Vienna.

(opera music)

Letters of introduction opened doors,

and he was helped to find a room,

a piano, a wig, and new clothes.

Beethoven made his way around the palaces

of Vienna's nobility,

Lichnowsky, Razumovsky, van Kase, van Swieten,

Kinsky, Lobkowitz,

with their music rooms and private orchestras.

Beethoven could not have been

in a better place at a better time.

- There is this idea in the air

among those connoisseurs who had heard Beethoven

and followed his progress so far,

that this might be the next really big person.

He was dressed well, looked quite striking.

He seems to have been, in some ways,

a quite fashionable figure.

He even briefly owned a horse,

though he characteristically forgot to feed it.

He was also brusque, rude, forthright,

an impatient young man.

- [Juliet] By night, he lived it up in Vienna,

but by day he studied hard with Haydn.

- At some point during his tuition,

Beethoven complained to Haydn

that he was not getting enough money

from the elector to support himself in Vienna,

and he undoubtedly was looking to have more time

and trying not to return to Bonn.

So Haydn took it upon himself to write to the elector,

enclosing some pieces Beethoven had given him,

and suggesting that certainly Beethoven

have a higher stipend.

Haydn was shocked when he received a letter back

from the elector in Bonn,

saying essentially that not only had Beethoven

misrepresented the amount of money he was getting,

but also that the compositions

that Beethoven had given Haydn, were not new ones.

What Beethoven had done was a little bit of a con game.

He behaved to some extent like a scam artist.

The upshot of this episode

was that the elector wrote to Haydn and said,

perhaps it's time for Herr Beethoven to come home.

- [Juliet] Beethoven never had to make that trip home.

News came that a French army

had reached Bonn and forced the elector to flee.

Beethoven could try and establish himself

as an independent musician.

- Up to Beethoven's time,

composers were primarily expected

to fulfill the demands of their employees,

and to write the expected sort of music

for church services,

or court balls or whatever it would be.

By the late 18th century,

the old system is beginning to break down.

- Audiences were wider.

That's just inside the court,

and music was being sold wider,

and it was being written for everybody.

- [Juliet] In early 1795, at a charity concert

for the widows and orphans of musicians,

Beethoven had the chance to show off

before a wider audience at the popular (mumbling) Theater.

The piece was one of his own piano concertos.

- [Roger] Mozart had shown the way.

The piano concertos are for showing off, Mozart.

Beethoven knew about piano concertos.

I think he thought at that stage,

that's what he would be, a composer pianist,

but very much a pianist for the rest of his life.

He would certainly have wanted to show his dexterity,

his skill, his brilliance at the keyboard.

But as a budding composer,

of course, he also wanted to show

what marvelous musical ideas he had.

- I think with any work on Beethoven,

it's the force of his personality, which is so strong.

Simultaneously in this piece,

you feel this tremendous admiration and respect

for the greatest composers of the past,

and you feel his own personality asserting itself.

- Nowadays composers somehow aren't supposed to

imitate other people, you know,

they've gotta be original, originality.

In the old days it wasn't like that at all.

I mean, Bach imitated people,

Handel borrowed ideas,

Mozart borrowed ideas,

Haydn borrowed ideas.

You learn from your parents.

You learn from your teachers,

you imitate their style for a bit,

and then you go your own way.

Beethoven unashamedly

wanted to be as good as Haydn and Mozart,

and then when he found he was, he wanted to be a better.

- [Ludwig] Vienna, June, 1794.

To Eleonore von Breuning, Bonn.

The piano variations I have written

will be rather difficult to play.

I resolved to embarrass those Viennese pianists,

some of whom pass my style off as their own,

and are thus my sworn enemies.

I wanted to take revenge,

because I knew they'll try to play these new pieces

and that they'd struggle.

- Sometimes you get a vivid snapshot,

the famous snapshot of him being asked

in a drawing room to play something.

Play, play something please, please Herr Beethoven,

in Vienna when he was younger,

and he didn't really want to do it,

but he sat down at the,

he sat down at the keyboard,

opened up the lid and waited for a moment.

And then he just,

he brought his arms on all the keys.

"That's my piece for this evening," and got up and left.

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Ludwig] Vienna, August, 1794.

We're having very hot weather here,

and the Viennese are afraid that soon

they will not be able to get any more ice cream.

As the winter was so mild, ice is scarce.

Here, various important people have been locked up.

It is said that a revolution is about to break out,

but I believe, that so long as an Austrian

can get his brown ale and his little sausages,

he's not likely to revolt.

If your daughters are grown up,

prepare one to be my bride.

Times are bad.

My exchequer is completely empty,

and I am driven to ask you for loan,

but my art is winning me friends and renown,

and what more do I want?

I'm sure I'll soon make a great deal of money.

- It's really worth bearing in mind that in the 1790s,

Beethoven was really the preeminent

keyboard virtuoso in Vienna.

I mean, he was really the number one keyboard star.

He was kind of, you know, the big name.

- [Juliet] At 24, Beethoven's reputation

gave him the stature to publish his work,

beginning with his Opus Number One.

The growing business of publishing

paid a one off fee to composers.

These fees became Beethoven's main source of income.

Hardly had Opus One reached Vienna's musical elite,

then a new publication arrived, Opus Two.

- It must have created a sort of shock,

and in Vienna, it's such passionate, new music.

So there's a,

things are getting closer

and tension is getting higher, of course.

So this is a way

which is totally unknown to Mozart and Haydn,

who generally build their ideas

on a classical elegant symmetry.

There's something, there's the answer.

Another thing, the answer to this other thing, a new idea,

and so the music is going on like this,

with this fantastic and beautiful sense

of symmetry and harmony,

while Beethoven goes through

building tension for the listener.

And most of his pieces

have this kind of progression,

in time, in rhythm, in tension,

in building up this dramatic urge.

- He must've had a hand that was

quite large, or at least quite capable

of being spread out,

because he'd write things, there's this sonata,

the second Sonata that he wrote,

and there's a passage in it that goes like this.

Which of course is what every pianist does in this spot.

But in fact, he writes a fingering for it, he himself,

and the fingering is this.

So, no left hand.

So he would probably put his left hand in the air

and see him, I'm doing this on my own, you know?

It's actually, I've never seen any pianist

who could possibly do this.

So of course, the standard way of performing it is,

just use your two hands, which he may have,

he may have left out chords for the left hand,

just in order to let lesser pianists play this.

Or this may be a great cosmic joke that fingering,

which he put into annoy everybody else.

- [Juliet] Beethoven continued to release bold new works

in different styles, and for different instruments.

(soft cello music)

- That's the beginning

of the Allegra of this first movement,

so the real movement starts.

And before that we had like three, four minutes

of slow introduction,

and the slow introduction comes to this complete stop.

And for a 26-year-old, unbelievable the arrogance

this guy must have had to just freeze,

freeze the time like this,

and he has the pianist play these chords.

(humming)

Two, three,

four, and then the cello comes.

- [Juliet] Life was good.

Extra income was coming in

from a lucrative sideline in piano lessons

for Vienna's wealthy.

His search for fame and fortune was going well,

his search for a wife, less so.

- I think a lot of Beethoven sonatas

were actually composed or dedicated to female,

you could call them students of his,

or ladies he admired.

Beethoven was actually forever in love

with all his students and all the ladies he met.

And one of his ways of showing it,

was to write them a piano sonata.

So they all had their own Beethoven sonata.

These were dedicated to the Countess from Braun Michael,

the British diplomat in Vienna.

And Beethoven must have liked her very much,

considering the cheerful music he wrote.

He actually wasn't interested

in writing piano sonatas at all.

What he really wanted to do

was write symphonies and operas,

and these piano sonatas, they were highly popular.

I mean, they sold well,

so he felt he had to produce them too,

to keep generating money.

- [Juliet] Beethoven felt ready

to take on Mozart and Haydn

in the pinnacle of private music, string quartets.

(uptempo string music)

- I see that at the base of the Opus 18 as,

bursting with confidence in his own extraordinary abilities,

completely sure that he's a genius.

- [Juliet] At 29, Beethoven gave a first concert

for his own benefit.

He included works by Mozart and Haydn,

and premiered his first symphony.

I strongly believe the first chord

of the first symphony, Beethoven symphony,

probably sounded as a shock to the audience.

(speaking in foreign language) Ludwig van Beethoven.

- The first symphony is a masterpiece,

from the first pizzicato again,

the pizzicato which opens is a shower, what?

And then again.

And then again you see,

pizzicato is so original there.

- [Ludwig] Vienna, January, 1801.

Dear Herr Hoffmeister,

I'm offering to sell you a symphony.

How much it's worth does not concern me

because I'm really an incompetent businessman

who is bad at arithmetic.

There ought to be in the world a market for art,

where the artist would only have to bring his works,

and take as much money as he needed.

But, as it is, an artist has to be a businessman as well.

- [Juliet] The quartets and the symphony

were modestly received.

But having sold the rights to his music,

Beethoven's future earnings had to come from new work.

- [Ludwig] June 29th, 1801.

Dear friend,

My compositions bring me in a good deal.

I'm offered more commissions

than it is possible for me to carry out.

But my wretched health has put a nasty spoke in my wheel.

My ears hum and buzz day and night.

I lead a miserable life.

For almost two years I have ceased to attend

any social functions,

just because I find it impossible to say to people,

I am deaf.

In my profession, it is a terrible handicap.

At a distance, I cannot hear

the high notes of instruments or voices.

November 16th, 1801.

Dear friend,

For the last few months, Doctor Varing

has made me apply to both arms a certain kind of bark.

It is an extremely unpleasant treatment.

However, I am now leading a slightly more pleasant life,

brought about by a dear charming girl,

who loves me and whom I love.

For the first time I feel that marriage

might bring me happiness.

Unfortunately, I am not of her class.

- [Juliet] The dear charming girl was probably a pupil,

the teenage Countess, Julieta Guicciardi.

To her, he dedicated his Opus 27, Number Two,

later called the Moonlight Sonata.

Julieta's parents, it seems,

would not allow her to marry a mere piano teacher.

(dark piano music)

- Beethoven sat down at some point,

and thought, I'll start a sonata differently.

I want it to have a fast movement at the beginning.

I'll have a slow, completely introvert movement,

that has a very, very, extremely simple tune,

and one that's endlessly sad.

- [Juliet] Frequent sickness and declining hearing,

allied with a deep love of the countryside,

spurred him to leave Vienna each summer,

for the rural peace and thermal spas

that lay just beyond the city walls.

In 1802, he came to the village of Heiligenstadt.

(sentimental piano music)

- It's in this very room

that he wrote his so-called Heiligenstadt Testament,

which was a letter of utter desperation.

Suicidal, Beethoven was having a mental breakdown.

He was thinking of killing himself.

- [Ludwig] Ever since my childhood,

my heart and soul have been imbued

with a tender feeling of goodwill.

But just think, for the last few years

I've been inflicted with an incurable complaint,

endowed with a passionate and lively temperament,

I was soon obliged to seclude myself and live in solitude.

I could not bring myself to say to people,

speak up, shout, I am deaf.

My misfortune pains me doubly,

inasmuch as it leads to my being misjudged,

I must live like an outcast.

How humiliated I have felt.

If somebody heard a shepherd sing, I heard nothing.

Such experiences almost made me despair.

And I was on the point of putting an end to my life.

The only thing that held me back was my art,

for indeed it seemed to me impossible

to leave this world before I had produced

all the works that I had felt the urge to compose.

And thus, I have dragged on this miserable existence.

Oh mighty God, look down into my innermost soul.

You see into my heart,

and You know that it is filled with love for humanity,

and a desire to do good.

- [Juliet] From the pit of despair,

Beethoven emerged more defiant.

God had given him a rare talent.

He wasn't going to waste it.

- The (mumbling) Sonata for me,

I find one of the greatest sonatas that he wrote

for violin and piano.

It's a huge piece.

It's maybe a piece where he,

where he tries to find extremes.

Also its incredible tension.

I think from (mumbling) violin sonatas,

I mean, sonatas for piano and violin,

it is for me definitely

the wildest one and technically also

the most demanding one.

(speaking in foreign language)

Is the Dutch word,

which maybe

also marks that period in his life, I don't know.

There's so much almost brewing there and

boiling.

(dramatic piano music)

- It's incredibly dramatic.

The orchestral Tori is long.

The piano plays very melancholy,

unbelievably varied music.

(dramatic orchestral music)

Stylistically speaking,

the beginning of the 19th century,

and the composition

of the C Minor Piano Concerto of Beethoven

represents an unbelievable watershed,

a kind of massive break with tradition.

(dramatic music)

- That's the divide.

That's the kind of

the earthquake movie or the earth moves between two areas.

Suddenly one is thrust into the air,

and the other goes down.

That's the Beethoven,

that's the Beethoven experience.

That's extraordinary new creativity,

new explosive force that Beethoven brings to the world.

Not in the first and second piano concertos,

but in the third, and particularly in the third symphony,

of course, which is wild.

Immensely ambitious, a monster.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- The range of Beethoven is fundamental

to the greatness of his art,

the degree to which every single work

is different from every other.

Each, it has been said often about Beethoven,

that every work inhabits a sound world of its own,

and yet he could write a 50 minute work,

all in that one sound mode,

is perhaps fundamental to his greatness.

- I've always been considering the symphony very complex,

probably too complex for me to approach.

But when I started very carefully,

I just took a serious amount of time, and I learned it.

I discovered such a

power in composing

and such a precision in saying,

in writing what he wanted to say,

to find the right words,

the right notes, to say what he wanted, what he meant.

And now today,

today I'm here and am considering

at least the first movement

of Eroica as the best written first movement

of any symphony.

It's so masterfully written.

The power of the March of (mumbling), the Travel March,

is incredible,

is so deeply, so moving,

even when comes the midsection

with this fugato this fuga,

and when the energy is just

growing, growing, growing, growing

until a limit to probably, before Beethoven,

no one could achieve.

- [Juliet] Beethoven's third symphony is significant,

not only musically, but historically.

Beethoven was inspired by the French revolution.

Liberty, equality, and fraternity,

and by the rise of a fellow genius.

Napoleon Bonaparte had crushed the Austrians in battle,

but an uneasy truce now reigned.

Beethoven could safely name his new symphony, Bonaparte.

- Beethoven may well have felt,

as did a lot of people at the time,

that this military conquest was not primarily military,

but primarily a philosophical and political, you know,

a social revolution, and that the result would be,

not the Viennese finding themselves

under the thumb of another dictator,

but the Viennese being set free to pursue enlightened goals.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- It's an interesting question because Beethoven

would have written such explosive music

as he sometimes did,

without the prompting from

world events at the time.

Beethoven was intensely interested

in the events in Paris in 1789.

He knew people at the French embassy in Vienna,

and heard a lot about what was going on in Paris.

He was very excited by the idea

of a new world,

new world order,

brotherhood of man,

getting rid of the bad parts of the old aristocratic world,

which of course he still lived.

But when Napoleon became a dictator and crowned himself,

he was horrified.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- This is the famous score of the Eroica symphony,

in which Beethoven furiously scratched out.

You can see the hole in the paper,

the word 'Bonaparte,"

to whom the symphony was originally dedicated.

And when Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor,

Beethoven decided he would have no more to do with him.

- [Juliet] On its premiere in 1805,

he'd renamed it, Eroica, The Heroic Symphony.

(energetic orchestral music)

(audience applauding)

- If somebody mentioned Napoleon, he would say, well,

he may be the ruler of the world,

but mine is the empire of the mind.

This is one of the most important developments

in the history of music, in a sense,

the ascent of instrumental music to this peak

of artistic expression,

and Beethoven, is both caught up

in that changing view

of instrumental music, and is also I think,

largely part of the cause of it.

It was very much his orchestral music,

the music that really changed the way

that people thought about instrumental music,

and what it was saying,

and the kind of access that it could give us

to the transcendental to the infinite.

- [Juliet] Age 33, Beethoven was established

as Vienna's foremost composer and pianist,

but he continued to experiment.

- You can see he's doing things

that he was particularly good at, I think.

He was very good at obviously repeated notes,

things like this.

He was good at that,

because there's a lot of that in his music.

He was good at things like

at the end of this piece,

nobody had ever written stuff like this.

This is, well actually

I can't really play it quite honestly,

but if you put the pedal down,

get a nice piano, hope for the best,

it makes an amazing effect.

And the idea of playing these octaves,

with that rapidity,

and just gliding down the piano,

is something that Beethoven invented, actually,

probably for two reasons.

One, because he could do it,

and two, to annoy everybody else who couldn't.

I do know that he was very instrumental

in the piano becoming a bigger, more powerful,

and more flexible instrument,

'cause he was always writing

to the piano makers

to make pianos bigger, stronger, louder.

(dark piano music)

- [Juliet] By 1804, Beethoven was comfortable enough

to move to a new apartment on the edge of the city.

Here, he would write three symphonies, an opera,

a violin concerto, string quartets,

and put the finishing touches

to a triple concerto for piano, violin, and cello.

- Beethoven was an incredibly difficult tenant.

He had no idea about keeping a place tidy,

lived in chaos.

He loved the views, there's a great view

looking at the Vienna woods from the window over there,

but on this side, there's no windows.

And so I have a quotation here from Ferdinand Ries.

"His main room was the last one on the far wall.

The adjoining house was only

two stories high at that time,

so that if there were a window on that wall,

Beethoven thought,

the room would be a corner room

with a clear view."

So, you can just picture the whole scene

of Beethoven secretly gets a stonemason in,

starts chiseling a hole in the wall.

Herr (muffled), the landlord,

runs up the stairs,

confrontation, Beethoven can't understand

what the problem is about, threatens to move out.

(uptempo instrumental music)

Beethoven had a habit, when composing,

of beating in time with a stick on the floor.

You can imagine, the apartment below was being rented.

And for instance,

composing, sitting at the piano,

gets very hot one day,

one evening,

takes a bucket of water, pours it over his head.

Of course, the water runs down into the apartment below,

which is being rented.

Poor Herr (muffled), the landlord,

then comes running up the stairs again,

another confrontation.

So this is what you had to put up with

Beethoven as a tenant.

- [Juliet] Beethoven's love life had heated up too,

this time with a young widow.

- [Ludwig] For a long period my deafness

has made me despair of ever achieving any happiness

during my life on this earth.

But now, things are no longer so bad.

Oh, beloved Josephine.

It is no desire for the other sex that draws me to you,

know it is just you,

your whole self with all your individual qualities.

You have conquered me.

I love you as dearly as you do not love me.

You were so very sad yesterday, dear Josephine.

Am I really unable to influence you?

Although you have so great an influence on me,

and make me so happy.

To the publishers, Breitkopf and Härtel Leipzig.

Sirs, the fee for my work is much lower

than what I usually accept.

Send me back the manuscripts.

I cannot and will not accept a lower fee.

Dear mayor,

the copyist should immediately ink over

what I have entered in red pencil.

I can not come myself,

as I've been suffering from my usual complaint, colic pains.

- [Juliet] While Beethoven was struggling

with these personal and professional affairs,

he wrestled with the ultimate creative challenge,

music, words, and drama together, opera.

In 1803, he was given a story by Emanuel Schikaneder,

at the Theatre an der Wien,

who had commissioned Mozart's Magic Flute.

The tale of an imprisoned man

rescued from darkness by a loyal wife,

and of love and liberty in general,

naturally appealed to Beethoven.

By 1805, the opera was ready.

(singing in foreign language)

(speaking in foreign language)

- In Beethoven, especially at Pizzaro,

you find difficulties,

because here Beethoven makes you sing,

I call it (foreign words),

because the character, this evil nature

who enters on scene,

he doesn't sing lines or arias.

It is a pure emotional eruption.

(singing in foreign language)

(speaking in foreign language)

(singing in foreign language)

- He was incredibly positive on some level.

He was someone who believed in hope.

He writes actually unbelievably hopeful music,

maybe in his music, at least,

this is not biographical at all,

in his music was maybe less concerned

with human beings

in the flesh,

and more concerned with humanity as an idea.

(speaking in foreign language)

(singing in foreign language)

- The idea that love is greater than injustice,

than tyranny, this is so deeply felt by him.

The conception of love

that we in our time,

that who are bombarded by trash, by video clips,

by YouTube, everybody can put his trash in it.

There is, it is so awful what our times,

our informal times,

where we all can do whatever we like,

where there is no radio any longer.

Go into modern art museums, you'll see trash.

There, a book next to it, and they explain it.

You don't see trash, it is holy art.

And this is all so little, and so,

in comparison to the greatness of this

feelings of the pureness of the feelings

that Beethoven composed there,

that I think it is unique,

but it's because he felt it.

(singing in foreign language)

(speaking in foreign language)

- He spent a year and a half writing this.

Lots of versions, lots of changes,

lots of rehearsals were needed.

It was far too difficult for the performers.

And then just a week before it was due to be scheduled,

at last, the French invaded Vienna,

and that meant that there was

hardly anybody in the audience.

(singing in foreign language)

- French military people in uniform.

They were the ones who could get in,

and who bought the tickets.

This hymn to liberation and freedom

was performed to an invading and repressive army.

(triumphant orchestral music)

- [Juliet] The timing could not have been worse.

After three shows, the opera closed.

But Beethoven was discontented with it,

and continued to rework Fidelio for a decade.

He never managed to complete another opera.

But from adversity, creativity,

the hallmark of a great artist.

(soft orchestral music)

- With the fourth symphony,

we return to a much simpler world,

but he begins with a wonderful joke.

He starts very, with a very slow, dark, minor movement,

as if it's going to be another brooding piece,

like the Eroica.

- Suddenly when it comes, the Allegro,

is just like to open a bottle of champagne.

(bright, uptempo orchestral music)

- The symphony number four explodes

from this darkness.

And then you have a perfect example of

an easy joy, desire of joy.

(uptempo orchestral music)

- The orchestra burst into laughter,

as if it's laughing at us

for taking all that so seriously.

This humor in Beethoven is terribly important.

- [Ludwig] My dear friend, thank you for the wine.

Whenever I and my friends drink it,

we toast your health as we get drunk.

Oh, have you heard about fat Schuppanzigh?

He's got married to someone as fat as he is.

Can you picture what their offspring will be like?

- I tend to think of this piece

as being an amazing love story,

and little question mark, insecurity,

that you experience performing this piece as well.

I think it's part of the idea,

part of the character of this concerto.

Can see that this is not somebody

having a comfortable life.

This is somebody that is in constant struggle.

I see somebody,

very profound,

somebody very unlucky,

but somebody who has so much love to give.

(speaking in foreign language)

- There were so many compositions

pouring out of him in different mediums.

It's almost as if life is becoming

so impossible for him

that his life is becoming that of a composer.

I mean, that's where he does his living.

He was actually able to,

not only compose wonderful new pieces as a deaf man,

but introduced completely new styles,

and sonorities, purely through his aural imagination.

But even before people knew he was going deaf,

they considered the Rasumovsky Quartet to be quite mad.

- Beethoven's growing deafness,

and his awareness of his growing deafness,

caused him to react

differently to the world around him.

It would have affected his social interaction.

It would have prevented him

from pursuing all of the kinds of social contacts

that he wanted to,

or in the ways that he wanted to.

It would have affected his perception of himself,

to think that as a composer, as a musician,

he had the one affliction that people would be,

most shocked to learn.

I think that Beethoven really would have had to

come to grips with his own self image, to some extent.

And that's why in a sense that it is

extraordinarily heroic, for all the talk about suicide,

which of course is I think genuine.

It is a heroic act to come to grips with

a disability that is profoundly tied up

with one's self image,

and the image of the world of Beethoven.

- The full range of emotions

must be allowed to go on in his mind.

And if he goes a bit towards the extremes,

in his handling of other people,

I think that for great geniuses like Beethoven,

I think that is forgiven.

What kind of person

one might've met if one had had

the good or bad fortune to meet Beethoven.

It might've been pretty scary.

What was it?

Somebody said when Rossini met Beethoven,

the butterfly met the lion.

I think one might've felt a bit like a butterfly

in Beethoven's presence.

The caricature of Beethoven, wild hair everywhere,

it implies a lack of control and a lack of

serious organized thought,

and that is the antithesis of Beethoven.

He was absolutely all about serious organized thought,

no lack of control at all.

Yes he is, if you like,

full of apparently uncontrolled temperament, and anger,

but there is also the opposite,

the immensely sensitive and kind

and generous, warmhearted,

and also deeply vulnerable man,

which will never appear in a caricature.

He's the whole range.

Fundamentally it is positive

he's not misanthropic or malevolent,

he's wanting always to communicate

beauty and warmth and love and hope.

(sentimental cello music)

- [Ludwig] September 20th, 1807.

Dear beloved and only Josephine,

may heaven grant me one undisturbed hour to spend with you.

I do not care to put up

with the refusals of your servant any longer.

Is it really a fact that you do not want to see me anymore?

If so, do be frank.

- [Juliet] Beethoven spent the year 1808

hard at work preparing for an epic concert,

a four hour extravaganza, all Beethoven.

- If there is one snowing night in Vienna,

where I could go to a concert,

this would be absolutely this famous concert,

when Beethoven wanted absolutely to show

to Vienna how great he was.

- I think that he saw this as an opportunity,

at the age of 38,

to finally make his mark on Viennese musical life.

And perhaps even finally to

overcome what he must have seen

as his primary competitors in the music field,

which was surprisingly Haydn, Mozart.

But if you read contemporary music journalism,

there's constant talk of our three great composers,

our three great German composers,

Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven,

all in the present tense,

as if the fact that Haydn was too old and feeble

to compose didn't count anymore.

Or the fact that Mozart was dead didn't count anymore.

And I think Beethoven had this chip on his shoulder.

I think he'd always had a chip on her shoulder,

especially with respect to Mozart,

and he saw then the concert of 1808

as an opportunity to

defeat his rivals.

- [Juliet] The theater was full, a maelstrom of noise,

as the audience hurried in from the snow.

Beethoven deliberately started

with his quietest opening movement yet.

(light orchestral music)

- You have a piece like the Pastoral Symphony,

which in its own serious way,

exploits these mimetic gestures

that are supposed to evoke nature.

So you have the opening movement,

the pastoral movement,

you have a slow movement.

The scene by the brook.

You have a storm.

It's really a tremendous amount of variety.

Beethoven is saying, I'm more serious, I'm better.

In every respect,

it's calculated to be an overwhelming event.

(audience applauding)

- [Juliet] After the sixth symphony,

Beethoven sat at the piano, and performed a new concerto.

(dramatic piano music)

(dramatic orchestral music)

- Here for the very first time in the keyboard literature,

we have a piece in which the piano

actually begins the entire piece.

The thematic material

is stated by the piano at the beginning,

and you have this amazing.

The first theme, which is presented by the piano alone.

I mean, nothing this remarkable,

nothing with this sense of revolution and volatility

has ever been heard by a Viennese audience

in the beginning of the 19th century,

let alone the 18th century.

That the piano can present such a

strangely amorphous theme,

and then be answered by the orchestra in B major,

is absolutely,

I mean, the degree to which that is shocking

is just immeasurable by our 21st century standards.

I mean, if I play a cadence

which ends on the dominant of G major,

and then the orchestra answers me in B major,

this kind of harmonic palette, tonal palate,

use of keys, modulations,

completely unheard of

even by Beethoven's standard, I think.

- I don't think that Beethoven wanted to show the world

that he was a better composer.

I think what he did want to show the world

was that there were a lot of these charlatan,

charlatan composers,

who were making a huge living,

and had enormous success

with writing absolute, terrible music,

and Beethoven couldn't stand that.

And I think that was something

where he wanted to prove to the world

that he was on a much higher level

and a far better composer, better pianist.

(bright orchestral music)

There is a lot of wildness,

there is a lot of almost aggression.

There is a lot of abundance,

so I wouldn't be surprised if you look at his father,

did they sometimes say that his father

used to drink too much?

And it was quite wild and aggressive, could be quite nasty.

I'm sure there must've been something true of it.

And it's probably ended up in Beethoven as well.

I mean, it runs in the family.

I think Beethoven probably

had more of his father inside him,

then he would have liked,

but that's probably what gave his music

such enormous strength and power.

I don't think, to be a good composer

you shouldn't be completely normal.

- What is amazing about the works of Beethoven,

is how much he's always constantly sort of, you know,

digging at the material,

and in the material too, to reach, to reach deeper.

And I feel often for Beethoven, deeper means,

at the end of the day, higher.

- The fourth concerto is one of those

heartbreaking pieces in the sense that we know

that it's the last concerto that Beethoven played in public.

The effect that that disappointment

had on Beethoven's career, his confidence,

his ideas of his self worth,

I think must have been massive.

The idea of Beethoven, the pianist,

suddenly became questionable,

became fraught with problems,

because of his deafness

and his frustration with the keyboards.

His frustration at being able to play the keyboards.

So the fourth concerto

is sort of that last glimpse

of Beethoven's brilliance and virtuosity,

and revolutionary character as a pianist and composer.

The fourth concerto was considered

immensely difficult by contemporary standards,

at the beginning of the 19th century.

It was one of those pieces I think

that was absolutely tailor-made

for Beethoven's pianistic abilities.

(audience applauding)

To put oneself in the shoes of a person like that,

who was really at the forefront of Viennese musical life

as a virtuoso keyboard player,

to suddenly be faced with the sort of

end of an entire chapter in his life,

as a keyboard virtuoso, must have been a major, major blow.

- [Juliet] No one guessed he would never perform

a piano concerto in public again.

After an intermission,

the audience heard what would become

the most famous notes of all time.

- The opening of Beethoven's fifth symphony

is like to give a uppercut to the people,

to the audience is just to.

- Beethoven would start with a da-da-da-daaa.

We can invert that.

We can repeat it.

("Beethoven's Fifth Symphony")

Mozart could a write symphony in four days.

Beethoven could do that too.

He could write very, very fast,

but sometimes he wanted to work and work

and make something grander,

and he was thinking more of the future.

Mozart was writing for Saturday,

and Beethoven was beginning to write for eternity, you know,

that was one of the conversations he had with his creator.

He wanted to be as it were, a great composer, I think.

- I mean, if we look at the fifth symphony here,

when he's worked himself up into a frenzy,

he was writing a fortissimo passage,

and you can get notes flying all over the page,

and you see tremendous displays of temperament,

and also in the crossings out,

in great swishes of pen all over the place.

- To the composing process in Beethoven,

he's more similar to the work in progress

of a sculpture, like Michelangelo.

So you already have a complex idea

of what the statue will be,

but you have to work a lot

to take all the extra marble

or the extra element just to live

the pure artistic product.

- In the fifth symphony,

when you get to the end of the (mumbling)

and everything seems to fizzling out,

and then it builds up instead,

and you see what is going to happen now?

You have been sitting that for nearly half an hour,

and it all builds up and quite suddenly,

everything thunders!

- [Juliet] Beethoven had thrown all the dice.

But four hours of unfamiliar music

in a freezing cold theater

was too much for his audience.

- It was not a success in the sense that

people probably wanted to go home.

But I think it was a success

in that the very fact that Beethoven could pull it off.

Kind of doing it is more important

than having it be a success.

And it is, as I say,

simply so monumental that you've got to admire the man

for, you know, undertaking it.

- [Juliet] One admirer, Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome,

offered Beethoven a permanent post

in the German town of Cassel.

Beethoven accepted the offer

to the shock of Vienna's nobles.

Three of them, Prince Lopkowitz, a patron of the arts,

Prince Kinsky, also a great patron,

and the Archduke Rudolf, brother of the emperor,

and a pupil of Beethoven's,

changed his mind by offering him a healthy salary,

just to stay in Vienna.

(soft orchestral music)

- His music is so firmly rooted in everything human,

with all of its frailties and weaknesses

and shortcomings of all sorts.

But at the same time,

there's an element of Promethean struggle

and of attempt to always

reach higher and to never give up and never surrender,

something that always tries to elevate itself

from the difficulties or the misery

inherent to the human condition.

That's also what's so fascinating to me

is that he's perceived often as a misanthropic character,

but his music is also the music of an inveterate optimist,

of someone who never gives up in thinking that,

you know, men can be better.

- [Juliet] Events made it hard to be an optimist.

The French were back, and unlike last time,

Vienna opted to defend itself.

(explosions)

But a short siege brought the city to its knees,

followed by months of occupation.

(guns firing)

- [Barry] During the bombardments of Vienna,

Beethoven is said to have hidden in his brother's cellar,

covered his ears with a pillow to protect his weak hearing.

It was a terrible time for him.

There is lots of cannons and gunfire

and shortage of everything, and can't buy things,

can't buy boots.

The whole life is completely disrupted by the French.

- [Ludwig] What a destructive, disorderly life

I see in here around me,

nothing but drums, cannons,

and human misery in every form.

I had begun to have a little singing party

at my rooms every week, but the accursed war

has put a stop to everything.

- All the new nobility left Vienna

for the countryside,

where they were out of harm's way.

In particular, his close friend Archduke Rudolf

left in May, 1809,

and Beethoven wrote a very heartfelt personal piano piece

for Archduke Rudolf just before his departure,

"Lebewohl", Farewell.

- The invasion of the French must have been a mighty blow.

Beethoven had profoundly felt

and held ideas about equality,

brotherhood, the way a society,

a free society,

should work, and that he encouraged people to think that way

through his music.

(soft orchestral music)

- [Ludwig] Vienna, January 2nd, 1810.

Hardly had I recovered, when my illness sent me back to bed.

Is it any wonder?

We no longer have even decent bread to eat.

Vienna, February 4th, 1810.

We are being supplied with bad food

for which we have to pay incredibly high prices.

Vienna, May, 1810.

I should be happy if that thing had not settled in my ears.

If I had not read that a man should not voluntarily

quit this life so long as he can still perform a good deed,

I would have left this earth long ago, by my own hand.

- [Juliet] One moment contemplating suicide,

the next, asking his assistant to help him

smarten up with a new shirt and neckties.

Beethoven, approaching 40,

was hoping to woo another teenager to be his bride,

Therese Malfatti.

It seems he even wrote her a small piano piece,

later mistakenly called, Für Elise.

- It's funny to see how famous and well-known

a small piano piece like Für Elise has become

over the years.

It's certainly not Beethoven's best piano work,

but I think it's probably one of the few works

which actually

does what it was supposed to do.

I mean, it wasn't supposed to be played in concert.

It was supposed to be played by people at home,

and enjoyed by people who are playing it.

This is typically a piece which

is much more fun to play than to listen to.

So if you've heard it two or three times, I mean it,

it starts getting a little bit irritating.

- [Ludwig] Dear friend,

every day, there are fresh inquiries from foreigners,

new acquaintances, new circumstances.

But my master, Archduke Rudolf,

makes the same demand and wants me to be with him.

Your Imperial Highness,

I see that you want to have the effects of my music,

tried on the horses as well.

For that favor, I shall remain as long as I live,

your most willing servant.

The music will be brought to you at the fastest gallop.

- There's a famous occasion in 1812,

when he briefly met Goethe, the great German writer,

one of the towering cultural figures

of early German romanticism,

and they are going for a walk

at the Teplitz, the spa,

and the Imperial party comes along,

and Goethe as a properly brought up, enlightenment,

18th century man, stands aside

and lets the party pass and takes off his hat.

Beethoven strides straight through the middle

as if indifferent to this.

Beethoven had this sort of pride.

- [Juliet] In Teplitz, Beethoven also wrote,

but never sent, letters to yet another love of his life.

Not a teenager this time,

but evidence would suggest

a married mother called, Antonie Brentano.

- Beethoven was intensely human

in the sense that he may have said

that, you know, he disapproves of

an extra marital affair,

or anyone who would engage or try to, foster one.

And yet he himself did because he fell in love.

- [Ludwig] Teplitz, July 6th, 1812.

My angel, my all,

Only a few words today.

Be cheerful and be forever my faithful,

my only sweetheart, to my all as I am yours.

However much you love me,

my love for you is even greater.

July 7th, 1812.

Even when I am in bed my thoughts rush to you,

my immortal beloved, now, and then joyfully,

then again, sadly,

waiting to know whether fate will hear our prayer.

No other woman can ever possess my heart.

Never, never, oh God,

why must one be separated from her who is so dear?

Your love has made me both the happiest

and the unhappiest of mortals.

- [Juliet] Beethoven's cash ran as short as his luck.

War had crushed the Austrian currency,

and his salary plummeted.

But good luck followed bad.

In 1813, the British General Wellington

defeated the French in Spain.

Beethoven accepted a lucrative commission

to write a patriotic symphony.

(anthemic orchestral music)

The war with France was finally over,

and a Congress convened in Vienna to divide the spoils.

The victors held endless balls,

and turned to Vienna's greatest composer

to entertain them with two new symphonies,

his seventh and eighth.

(rousing orchestral music)

While Europe rejoiced, Beethoven despaired,

his hearing had all but gone.

On the 25th of January, 1815,

at a concert for the Empress of Russia,

he sat at the piano to accompany a singer

in one of his early compositions.

(singing in foreign language)

- [Juliet] It was his last known

public appearance as a pianist.

(sentimental instrumental music)

Beethoven's relationship with his younger brothers,

both of whom had moved to Vienna, had never been easy.

Then in November, 1815, his brother Kaspar Karl died.

Beethoven, who'd always looked down on his brother's wife,

sought custody of his nephew, Karl.

For four years they fought bitterly over the young child.

- [Ludwig] Vienna, February 6th, 1816.

I have fought a battle for the purpose

of wrestling a poor unhappy child

from the clutches of his unworthy mother.

Last night, that queen of the night

was at the artist's ball until 3:00 a.m.,

exposing not only her mental, but also her bodily nakedness.

It was whispered that she was willing

to hire herself for 20 gulden.

I have to support my little nephew entirely.

Until now he has been at a boarding school,

that costs up to 1,100 gulden.

I have had bad luck again, with another servant.

He gets drunk, stays out of the house for nights on end,

and is shockingly rude.

My hearing has become worse.

I have never been able to look after myself and my needs.

I am even less able to do so now.

- In the late 18-teens,

Beethoven was somewhat more erratic in his behavior.

He was less conscientious about his hygiene.

He was

less controlled, let's say, when dealing with other people.

More likely to ignore etiquette

and proper social behavior.

He didn't compose as much.

And I suspect that there were

a number of reasons for this,

one would have been his increasing deafness,

another would have been his increasingly bad health.

And the third would have been

his increasingly difficult family situation,

especially with respect to his nephew Karl.

- [Juliet] These were terrible years,

but not entirely without composition.

- It's one of the sonatas that is perhaps the least known,

the least liked.

It's quite a demanding piece,

also for the listener, in fact.

They have to really,

they can't expect to just sit there passively,

and for something to grab them,

as maybe the case with Appassionata,

or Tempest, or so many other sonatas,

which have possibly more direct impact on the listener.

This is very, very complex.

- [Ludwig] I used to be able to make

all my other circumstances subservient to my art.

I admit however, that by doing so I became a bit crazy.

My servant has been quite different

since I threw those books at her head.

I still have to find a new housekeeper.

She must be a good cook,

and ought to be able to turn her hand to mending shirts.

The new kitchen maid made a really rye face

about carrying wood.

I trust that she will remember

that even our Redeemer had to drag his cross to Golgotha.

I am not at all well,

and for some time now I have again had to take medicine.

Hence I can scarcely devote myself for a few hours a day

to heaven's most precious gift to me, that is my art.

October 27th, 1819.

I am to be recognized forthwith as Karl's sole guardian.

Moreover, the mother is to be forbidden

to associate with her son.

August 5th, 1820.

I cherish the hope of being able perhaps

to set foot next year on my native soil,

and to visit my parents' graves.

(somber piano music)

(singing in foreign language)

- [Juliet] Beethoven's hearing got worse.

Custom-built ear horns got bigger.

Pianos were made louder.

At 49, he was completely deaf.

Friends could communicate only by writing.

- He becomes more and more reclusive,

cut off from the world by his increasing deafness,

and by his bitterness over the failure

of his affairs with women.

And in general, a darkening view of the world.

He obviously became very, very disorganized and shabby.

On one occasion, late in his life,

he was even arrested

because the Viennese police thought he was a tramp,

and took a lot of persuading

that he was in fact, the great Beethoven.

Apparently there were occasions when his friends

would actually

swap clothes that he'd discarded while he was sleeping,

and put new clothes in their place,

which he then put on the next day, without even noticing.

- If you were in luck,

you'd catch him in a very generous and expansive mood.

After all we know he liked his wine, he liked company.

He loved being at the tavern, drinking and eating,

and he may have even made a note to himself once

in his diary saying,

I really must make sure that every day

I seek the company of a musician

in order to find out more about how the violin works,

how the oboe works,

how the trombone works, and that way, in company,

to learn more about the instruments,

and about art and about life.

He was not only humble in that respect,

but he was warmhearted

and wanted to have contact with people.

Therefore, if you rang his doorbell,

of course he was immensely temperamental,

you might catch him at the wrong time

and get a bucket of water in your face.

But also, he might say, come in my dear fellow.

Yes, of course I invent these words, this is clear,

but one gets all the impressions

from all surviving documents,

one of which is a most amazing document

that came to light in Cornwall of all places in 1999.

And this was a hitherto unpublished, unknown,

totally unknown manuscript of a string quartet movement,

which is if I recall rightly about 26 bars.

It lasts under a minute,

but is a beautifully crafted work,

in an unusual key, B minor, which it turned out,

he composed on the spot for an English visitor

who called on him in Vienna in 1819.

I mean this is extraordinary.

- Another thing we have to bear in mind I think

is the contrast between the outward chaos

of his daily life, and the extraordinary control

that he was able to exert over the details of his music.

There's every truths in the kind of romantic image

of Beethoven as a composer

who expresses all sorts of emotions in his music.

But he's also in my view,

an incredibly cerebral composer as well.

The musical structures that he creates

are extraordinarily complex.

He's able to express or to exert, in his music,

the kind of control over detail

that clearly escaped him in daily life, altogether.

- [Juliet] Beethoven began composing

what would be the last of his piano sonatas,

Opus Works 110 and 111.

- You can see sometimes very obsessive elements

in the way he writes.

For instance, in the lamenting song,

the (muffled) that goes on in Opus 110,

when, when you have it for the second time in G minor.

There's such specific indications that he writes.

Even in those bars there are so many examples

of this obsession with detail.

He writes that it has to sound exhausted.

It's like you're, you're completely spent of energy,

and the feeling of trying to catch your breath.

And the way he actually manages

to convey that in his notation is amazing.

Here, you have these very short phrases,

which in some sense, could have been a longer line.

He could have written it like this.

So you just feel the continuity of that line.

But instead it's as if

we don't even,

we shouldn't even have enough breath in our lungs

to carry through these relatively short phrases.

So that feeling of exhaustion has to come across.

It's very difficult to do.

- In many of the late pieces,

it's like he is becoming more and more aware

of the acoustic phenomena,

and which is quite remarkable for somebody

who at this stage was totally deaf.

There's a place in the Opus 110 Sonata, for example,

which is just, it's just repeating,

just this note again and again.

He's repeating this note in the treble

again and again and again, listening to it.

- There's one part of the variation

that's just in the lower bit of the piano,

and one that's in the highest bit up there,

and this abyss in between, that's remaining untouched.

The little thing on the side,

we don't know if you really meant it,

but what happened here in the left hand,

is basically the theme of the Ode to Joy,

which he was hiding in there, if he really meant that.

It is the same time that he wrote this sonata.

This piece symbolizes eternity.

- [Ludwig] While I was dozing,

I dreamt that I was traveling

to very distant parts of the world, even to Syria,

and in fact to India and back again,

and even to Arabia,

and in the end,

even go to as far as Jerusalem.

However deterring this fame may seem on the surface,

the artist is not allowed

to be Jupiter's guest in Olympus every day.

Vulgar humanity too often drags him down

against his will from those pure ethereal heights.

- [Juliet] After more than four years in the writing,

and almost as much effort

in trying to sell it to Europe's royal families,

Beethoven revealed his proudest achievement,

his mass, the Missa Solemnis.

- [Ludwig] My chief aim when I was composing this mass,

was to awaken and permanently instill

religious feeling into the listeners.

(dramatic choral music)

(speaking in foreign language)

- He was very devoted to God,

and there are lots of little prayers

in his private writings.

And it slips out in a little court case with his nephew.

His nephew's asked,

does Beethoven ever pray with you?

He says, yes, he prays with me twice a day to God.

And we would never know this

if it just hadn't slipped out in the court case,

that every day, twice a day,

Beethoven was praying to God.

(dramatic choral music)

(speaking in foreign language)

(speaking in foreign language)

- [Ludwig] My income is practically nothing.

My poor health has not allowed me

to undertake professional tours,

or avail myself of all the means

by which a livelihood is made.

- [Juliet] While writing the Missa Solemnis,

Beethoven received an offer from London.

- [Ludwig] I am delighted to accept this offer

to write a new symphony for the Philharmonic Society.

If God would only restore my health,

and I could comply with all of the offers

from throughout Europe and even of North America.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- When he gets this block.

There is an urgency, an anxiety, in this symphony,

this anxious energy.

- It begins in despair.

He says, this is our despair, he writes in the margin

of the sketch for the Ninth Symphony.

And the second movement is no better,

it's also terrifying.

The hounds of hell are at your heels.

The third movement is an image

of something quite different, of love and beauty.

- When I conduct this movement,

I always imagine Beethoven, 53 years old,

probably not so energetic or not so powerful,

from some iconography,

we now know Beethoven was not a big man,

was not tall,

was pretty small man.

It probably was not with this kind of

posture, to be grand,

was a bit more intimate more,

more fragile,

more weak, and just saying that, okay,

I wrote the most sincere

confession about

the love of the life

he could write in music.

- And you wonder how he's going to

bring these things together,

and he finally does it

in the last movement with a simple tune,

which he spent weeks polishing

to make it simpler and simpler and simpler,

which is now the anthem of the European Union.

He brings hope and salvation to the despair

of the first movement.

("Ode to Joy")

- I think one of the points of the Ninth Symphony

is its monumentality,

plain and simple.

I don't think there had ever been a symphony certainly

so massive, as the Ninth, and for that reason alone,

it makes a profound impression.

(dramatic orchestral music)

(singing in foreign language)

- Very soon after that wonderful outburst,

everything stops and-

(singing in foreign language)

Now what is all this about?

(singing in foreign language)

One sort of disjointed line with no harmony,

just after a massively joyous outburst.

And this can only be puzzling,

and detract from the immediacy

of the entire work's ability to communicate immediately

with people who don't know Beethoven at all.

So the Ninth Symphony has got wonderful moments,

and some of the most universal moments in all Beethoven,

but as a piece it is,

I hate to say flawed,

because it's one of the most iconic,

perhaps the most iconic piece of classical music there is.

But I think it is flawed.

It is perhaps inevitable it's flawed,

because it's so original and that's why it's so great.

(singing in foreign language)

- If the end of the Ninth Symphony

is just, oh, happy end, we are all brothers,

we love each other.

I don't feel that in this music,

from the very

whisper in the shadow,

to this scream at the ends of everybody, all the musicians,

all the singers,

sharing, not this joy,

but this experience of joy,

this dream of joy

this, if only it could be like that.

(singing in foreign language)

(audience applauding)

- [Juliet] As the symphony ended,

Beethoven, standing near the wings,

was turned to face the audience, and was amazed.

After five ovations,

two more than the emperor traditionally received,

the police stepped in to silence the crowd.

(mournful violin music)

- [Ludwig] Baden, May, 1825.

Dear Doctor Braunhofer, I spit a good deal of blood.

I have frequent nose bleedings.

My stomach has become dreadfully weak.

(mournful string music)

Dear Karl, to be constantly alone makes me only weaker.

In any case, Death with his scythe

will not spare me much longer.

Before my departure for the Elysian Fields,

I must leave behind me what the eternal spirit

has infused into my soul, and bids me complete.

After all only art and science

gives us hopes of a higher life.

- His deafness at this stage,

perhaps even helped him creatively,

loosened all possible

barriers of convention,

practicability, accessibility,

so that he could

just follow his imagination wherever it took him.

(dramatic string music)

- The idea of these men was just

beyond the possibilities,

considered the possible at that time.

So is the imagination of Beethoven?

Probably, because he was deaf.

So he was disconnected in a way, from the reality.

Maybe he went much more deeply inside himself.

He tried to listen very carefully to his inner,

inner hearing,

just to listen

the very specific deep voice,

that was singing inside himself.

- I think the late quartets

are amongst the most

extraordinary creations of mankind.

There's something in the emotion

that's just completely changed.

And I, I don't know, I just have this personal feeling

that there's some form of acceptance of life,

and just celebrating all aspects of life,

including its pain, and including its suffering,

so that he was somehow able to accept that suffering

as simply a part of life.

- [Juliet] But that suffering intensified.

In August, 1826,

Karl, endlessly bullied by Beethoven,

tried to kill himself.

Such horror took its toll.

- [Ludwig] Vienna, March 6th, 1827.

I cannot foresee the end of my dreadful illness.

On the contrary,

my sufferings and my anxieties have only increased.

What am I to live on

until I have recovered my lost strength,

and can again, earn my living by means of my pen?

Vienna, March 10th, 1827.

My health, which will not be restored

for a very long time,

demands that you should send me the wines I asked for.

They will certainly bring the refreshment,

invigoration, and good health.

(energetic string music)

- [Juliet] Forever the optimist,

and planning new works, including a 10th symphony,

but Beethoven's body

had simply had enough.

On the 26th of March, 1827, age 56,

Beethoven died.

Thousands turned out to pay their last respects.

- His repeated attempts to monumentalize,

his repeated attempts to, you know, outdo,

all of his contemporaries,

were clearly eminently successful.

And so he became an intimidating figure.

And in that sense,

one part of Beethoven's legacy

is to push people away from him,

to push people in directions where they say,

I can't do what Beethoven did,

I'm not even going to try.

That's the essential difference then, in a way,

between Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart.

Beethoven could say,

I'm gonna do what Haydn and Mozart did, and just as well,

but people in Beethoven's time,

didn't feel that they could compete.

So that pushes kind of the creative act

or the compositional act for many composers,

away from the Beethovenian model.

The uniqueness of Beethoven,

and the attempt of composers,

writers, critics, listeners,

afterwards to come to grips with this uniqueness,

inevitably gave rise to a reevaluation of the past,

the present and future.

(celebratory orchestral music)

(audience applauding)