In Search of Beethoven

Rating:

* * * * *

Verdict:

Musicians speak for their composer and the music speaks for itself in expansive documentary about the composer whose work changed the classical world.

Beethoven has not fared well on the big screen. His scores are regularly rifled to serve duty on forgettable films from

Christmas with the Krank

s to

Mission Impossible III

, and the composer himself has been immortalised by such unlikely thespians as Ed Harris, Gary Oldman and even Lorne "Bonanza" Green.

The only Beethoven you'll see in Phil Grabsky's documentary, In Search of Beethoven, comes in the form of portraits; Grabsky lets the music and the musicians speak for their composer.

An expansive running time seems fitting for a man famous for stretching his musical canvases and the movie takes us from Beethoven's Bonn boyhood to deathmasks in Vienna and choral finales. Along the way, we are given tantalising bytes of music that did indeed change the world.

As happened with Grabsky's Mozart documentary three years back, it is frustrating to leave Frans Bruggen and his Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century after a few seconds, when you want to hear them at least finish the movement they are playing.

Janine Jansen's Kreutzer Sonata was another turn that cried out for full representation.

Nevertheless, the testament that these artists provide in their commentary is priceless.

While American pianist Emanuel Ax envies Beethoven's big finger span, his French colleague, Helene Grimaud, ponders the Promethean qualities of the Emperor Concerto.

Pianists will appreciate having Paul Lewis and Leif Ove Andsnes giving their thoughts on the mysteries of the slow movement of the Opus 110 Piano Sonata.

Cellist Alban Gerhardt, who visited us last year with the NZSO, comments on the young Beethoven's arrogant freezing of time in a Cello Sonata, while conductor Roger Norrington, wrapped up in sensible woollies, considers Beethoven as improv man. Then there is German bass-baritone Albert Dohmen who, discussing the role of Pizarro in Fidelio, takes aim at the sorry state of our times, "bombarded by trash, video clips and YouTube". The solution, of course, is the humanism of Beethoven's opera.

Of the various musicologists, Hebe Jeffrey has the best tale. Her subject is Beethoven, the tenant from hell - pointing out how anyone living below him would have to cope with the endless tapping of a cane on the floor and the occasional flood when the overheated composer doused himself with cooling water.

There are many memorable scenes in this film, none more so than when Beethoven's Heiligenstadt Testament, his cri de coeur in which he swore to remain steadfast despite his oncoming deafness, is intoned against the Moonlight Sonata and elegiac blue landscapes - a stand of courage and commitment we could all note when, all around us, the culture we so cherish struggles to survive.

William Dart

Pictured above:

Ronald Brautigam plays the piano in many of the film's pieces. Photo / Supplied