Being Beethoven, BBC Four review – from grubby kid to grumpy genius

Documentaries like this one make me sentimental for a time, until about 25 years ago, when classical music was a more or less weekly presence on terrestrial TV.

The “we” in this instance belongs to the British. Outside Japan, Beethoven has nowhere been more celebrated to a degree bordering on mania, even in his own Austro-German lands, even surviving wartime antagonisms and their present dismal resurgence. Beyond the music itself, perhaps the heroic failure of his personal life, the protestant drive for self-betterment, the colossal chip on his shoulder that left him congenitally inclined to bite the hand that fed him, all speak to elements of our collective psyche. According to the Viennese psychotherapist Bettina Reiter, his “narcissistic self-image” and other failings should be laid at the feet of his alcoholic father. We might have known.

Dr Reiter is one of many authoritative talking heads – I counted 14 of them in the first half-hour alone – given a sentence or three by director Phil Cairney to distil a lifetime’s learning into a made-for-TV soundbite, with mixed success. The anchoring presence was Jan Swafford, an old hand, whose encapsulation of the child Beethoven as "a tiny, friendless, grubby kid" rings all too true. Pianist Boris Giltburg illustrated his early talent for improvising with sequences from the “Emperor” Concerto, though without captions we are presumed to know this. Another lively presence was the organist and conductor Martin Haselböck, good on Beethoven’s ruthless approach to friendship – hardly uncommon among men of ambition – which drew people into his circle only for as long as they had something he needed.

Mirroring the time-honoured division of Beethoven's work into early, middle and late periods, this three-part documentary was inevitably handicapped in its first instalment by the nature of a creative talent in maturation. Pianist Viviana Sofronitsky (pictured above) – yes, daughter of the great Vladimir – popped up to point out that Beethoven’s little Dressler Variations are impressive enough for an 11-year-old but hardly the sign of genius to come, unlike the great leap forward of the three piano quartets he wrote four years later. Elsewhere the restless cutting brings diminishing returns. You can almost smell the anxiety of some interviewees in search of a zinger in the precious seconds allotted to them; Chi-chi Nwanoku told us that “as a musician, hearing is pretty vital”, Paul Lewis that “the introspective side of Beethoven can be overlooked.”. If we need to know this, what are we to make of an American musicologist’s claim for C minor as “the most characteristically pathetic of keys” without further elucidation?  

Once the hit-rate of masterpieces goes up, the frenetic pace slows down. It’s a relief as well as an education to listen to Iván Fischer conducting the “Eroica” and arguing that Beethoven's deafness helped him find his inner voice. If you make it that far, you’ll want to stay the course. Hats off to Cairney for not taking the worn path of composer biopic as costume drama, which in any case was so engagingly fronted by Charles Hazlewood 15 years ago in another BBC three-parter, “The Genius of Beethoven” (still available on YouTube). In the same three-hour span, however, new and old listeners stand to learn more from Phil Grabsky’s 2009 documentary “In Search of Beethoven”. Meanwhile Christian Berger's new Deutsche Welle film on the Ninth (“Symphony for the World”) might convince even the weariest cynic that in Beethoven, classical music has a future as well as a past.

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@peterquantrill