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movie review: Copying Beethoven
Nov. 13th, 2006 05:23 pmThis might be the first film based on classical music that I've seen since Amadeus came out. That was a good movie, though its relationship to reality is such that it's best thought of as concerning two fictional composers to whom the film-makers have confusingly given the names of two real composers, Mozart and Salieri. Copying Beethoven is not quite so good a movie, but it has what may - in the circumstances - be the virtue that one of its fictional lead characters is actually fictional. Her name is Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger), a top conservatory student who in that capacity is sent to help Beethoven (Ed Harris, if you can believe it) copy the parts of his Ninth Symphony just before its premiere. All I can say about that is that if it really were possible for women to break that particular glass ceiling in 1824, neither Beethoven nor anyone else would be so surprised to see one as they are here depicted.
Her name seems to come from Karl Holz, who was close to Beethoven in his last years (but after the Ninth was composed) and did do some copying for him then, but he was not a student but the second violinist in the string quartet that premiered most of his late works for that grouping. The whole situation as set up by the film is awfully confusing, because Wenzel Schlemmer, the character played by Ralph Riach in the film, was actually Beethoven's chief copyist, and the reason Beethoven was scrambling around for new copyists is that Schlemmer had died the previous year. So it's a little startling to find him lying in bed.
Anna turns out to be a pretty lousy composer (Beethoven is entirely right to dismiss the dorky contradance she shows him, even if his manner of doing so is unpardonably rude), but she is otherwise a paragon of virtue: a brilliant copyist who takes down sickbed dictation even when it mutates into vague description of the effect of the music, corrects right notes to the "wrong" ones she thinks are more characteristic of Beethoven, and turns the tables by conducting the premiere of the Ninth for him, crouching down among the musicians - does she think the audience couldn't see her there? - so that the deaf composer can follow her at the podium. I'm not even sure if that would work.
There are some gratifying nuggets of occasional fact tucked in here. It's true that Beethoven criticized his composition students for imitating him too much. It's also true that he was too deaf to conduct adequately any more, but instead of miming somebody else's conducting at the premiere of the Ninth, he just conducted the music in his head while the orchestra followed the concertmaster. It's also true that somebody had to turn him around so that he could see the applause he could no longer hear, but that someone was one of the singers, not the indispensable Anna. (The performance was grievously under-rehearsed and must have been pretty awful, but I'm willing to forgive the film for not depicting that.)
Beethoven could be as monstrous and arrogant as he's depicted here, but I don't recognize any of the specific behaviors from my reading, except for the washwater leaking through the floorboards. His relationship with his nephew was actually more fraught than depicted here: he attempted suicide two years after the Ninth premiered; so much for the beauty of the work turning his heart. And when the Grosse Fuge (not "Fugue" as spelled in the film credits: the title is in German) proved unpopular, guess what that irascible, holier-than-thou composer did? He meekly wrote another movement to replace it.
I saw one review that criticized the film for having a character say that Salieri was French. (He was actually Italian.) But in fact the character doesn't say that: she's referring to an unidentified assistant of Salieri.
The film can't decide exactly how deaf Beethoven was, or whether he held a baton when conducting the Ninth; and when the early 19th-century orchestra begins to play, late 20th-century orchestral sounds come out, which is almost as hilarious as if Ed Harris had opened his mouth and Diane Kruger's voice had come out. Harris is not as risible a Beethoven as one might expect: he is a real actor, with more than one character in him, and manages to submerge himself fairly well in this one. No astronaut or serial killer peeps out, though there are hints of a modernist painter. Kruger is at least passable in a ridiculous role, though ironically she makes a less believable conductor than Harris does. Watching her I was reminded of the cartoon showing a conductor at the podium, with instead of a score a piece of paper reading, "Wave arms around until music stops."
There's a moral lesson - listen through the silence for the music that is in your heart, blah blah blah etc etc - but I found it too vague to be commentable. Here's where Amadeus, however fictional its moral dilemma, was much more interesting.
Her name seems to come from Karl Holz, who was close to Beethoven in his last years (but after the Ninth was composed) and did do some copying for him then, but he was not a student but the second violinist in the string quartet that premiered most of his late works for that grouping. The whole situation as set up by the film is awfully confusing, because Wenzel Schlemmer, the character played by Ralph Riach in the film, was actually Beethoven's chief copyist, and the reason Beethoven was scrambling around for new copyists is that Schlemmer had died the previous year. So it's a little startling to find him lying in bed.
Anna turns out to be a pretty lousy composer (Beethoven is entirely right to dismiss the dorky contradance she shows him, even if his manner of doing so is unpardonably rude), but she is otherwise a paragon of virtue: a brilliant copyist who takes down sickbed dictation even when it mutates into vague description of the effect of the music, corrects right notes to the "wrong" ones she thinks are more characteristic of Beethoven, and turns the tables by conducting the premiere of the Ninth for him, crouching down among the musicians - does she think the audience couldn't see her there? - so that the deaf composer can follow her at the podium. I'm not even sure if that would work.
There are some gratifying nuggets of occasional fact tucked in here. It's true that Beethoven criticized his composition students for imitating him too much. It's also true that he was too deaf to conduct adequately any more, but instead of miming somebody else's conducting at the premiere of the Ninth, he just conducted the music in his head while the orchestra followed the concertmaster. It's also true that somebody had to turn him around so that he could see the applause he could no longer hear, but that someone was one of the singers, not the indispensable Anna. (The performance was grievously under-rehearsed and must have been pretty awful, but I'm willing to forgive the film for not depicting that.)
Beethoven could be as monstrous and arrogant as he's depicted here, but I don't recognize any of the specific behaviors from my reading, except for the washwater leaking through the floorboards. His relationship with his nephew was actually more fraught than depicted here: he attempted suicide two years after the Ninth premiered; so much for the beauty of the work turning his heart. And when the Grosse Fuge (not "Fugue" as spelled in the film credits: the title is in German) proved unpopular, guess what that irascible, holier-than-thou composer did? He meekly wrote another movement to replace it.
I saw one review that criticized the film for having a character say that Salieri was French. (He was actually Italian.) But in fact the character doesn't say that: she's referring to an unidentified assistant of Salieri.
The film can't decide exactly how deaf Beethoven was, or whether he held a baton when conducting the Ninth; and when the early 19th-century orchestra begins to play, late 20th-century orchestral sounds come out, which is almost as hilarious as if Ed Harris had opened his mouth and Diane Kruger's voice had come out. Harris is not as risible a Beethoven as one might expect: he is a real actor, with more than one character in him, and manages to submerge himself fairly well in this one. No astronaut or serial killer peeps out, though there are hints of a modernist painter. Kruger is at least passable in a ridiculous role, though ironically she makes a less believable conductor than Harris does. Watching her I was reminded of the cartoon showing a conductor at the podium, with instead of a score a piece of paper reading, "Wave arms around until music stops."
There's a moral lesson - listen through the silence for the music that is in your heart, blah blah blah etc etc - but I found it too vague to be commentable. Here's where Amadeus, however fictional its moral dilemma, was much more interesting.
