Classical music lovers may grumble that while Mozart received deluxe, if hardly reverential, treatment in Milos Forman’s 1984 Oscar winner Amadeus, devotees of Beethoven, no less a giant, must settle for this much less opulent 2020 German telefilm from writer-director Niki Stein.
Yet Stein’s effort, while relatively small-scaled, proves a committed tribute to the composer’s struggle not only to make a career for himself despite all the obstacles in his path but to take a stand against the rigidly elitist society of eighteenth-century Europe, in which those who were not of aristocratic birth—including the most brilliant artists, like Mozart—had to bow to those who reveled in their privilege and power.
Stein’s method is not to offer a complete biographical portrait, but instead to concentrate on Beethoven’s early years and the months immediately preceding his death. There is a loss in this approach—the middle portion of the composer’s life, during which he produced many of his best-known and most beloved masterpieces, are ignored, the music he wrote during them left unheard.
But as compensation, the film ties the aging man’s attitudes to the experiences of his youth, including a brief meeting with Mozart (Manuel Rubey), who proves too harried by the necessities of maintaining his high lifestyle to give a prospective pupil much time. It begins with the deaf composer (Tobias Moretti), financially strapped despite his fame, traveling with his orphaned nephew and ward Karl (Peter Lewys Preston) to the estate of his younger brother (Cornelius Obonya), where he hopes to finish the string quartet for which his publisher has already given him an advance.
It then shifts back to his childhood in Bonn, where as a talented child (Colin Pütz), he is pushed forward by his alcoholic father (Ronald Kukulies) as a prodigy. Recognizing the boy’s talent, the local Kapellmeister Neefe (Ulrich Noethen) takes him under his wing, but he also falls under the spell of Pfeiffer (Sabin Tambrea), a brash actor who preaches the Enlightenment doctrines of equality and revolution.
So when Beethoven has grown into a young man (Anselm Bresgott) of remarkable ability, he is supported professionally by a progressive aristocratic lady (Silke Bodenbender), who nonetheless makes it clear that, because of their social differences, she could never countenance his marrying her daughter (Caroline Hellwig)—the woman who, it is suggested, becomes his famous “immortal beloved.” That experience, Stein implicitly argues, cemented the commitment to egalitarianism that Beethoven had learned as a child and expressed through his music.
This does not mean that Louis van Beethoven is a cinematic treatise; marked by humor as well as drama, it emerges as a richly textured portrait of the man and artist. One can imagine it having benefited from a more elegant physical production, but even without extras, this DVD can be recommended.