Being Beethoven

Original version

BBC Four

BBC 4

Documentaries

Music: Classical

Music: Classical: Orchestral

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media: Arts

Beethoven's life story. Documentary series that focuses on the man behind the composer.

Documentary series that tells the life story of Beethoven in the context of the composer's own time and place, revealing a life following a very different trajectory to his art.

Series 1

BBC Four HD

Judith Robson

Ross Wilson

Flora Stewart

Phil Cairney

Matchlight

Being Beethoven: Series 1: Episode 1

Performances & Events

Episode 1

BBC Four - Being Beethoven, Series 1, Episode 1

Young Beethoven is an unstoppable force until the onset of deafness tears his world apart.

Groomed for greatness by an often abusive father, Beethoven emerges as a great but difficult talent, an unstoppable force, until the onset of deafness tears his world apart.

‘…this strange deafness…’ 

Unfolding chronologically, Being Beethoven grapples with the living, breathing human being often lost behind the myth of the Romantic genius. Beethoven emerges as a man of contrasts and extremes — driven by love, anguish, fury and joy — qualities woven through both his life and his music.
 
By returning the composer to the context of his own time and place, telling his life story in the present tense, Being Beethoven reveals how the composer’s life frequently appears to follow an entirely different trajectory to his art. What emerges is a complex and often contradictory individual living a life marked by isolation, ill-health and deafness. A man who, despite the frequent wretchedness of his personal circumstances, manages to create musical masterpieces that have enthralled and uplifted the world for 250 years.
 
Episode 1 explores Beethoven's childhood, the crucible in which the man and his music are formed, and his subsequent rise to fame as a piano virtuoso, then composer, in late 18th-century Vienna. Groomed as a prodigy by a demanding and often violent father, Beethoven’s psyche is also marked by the death of his mother when he is 16 years old. Beethoven emerges as a great but troubled talent, an unstoppable force of nature until the onset of deafness tears his world apart. 
 
The realisation that Beethoven is losing his hearing — the sense upon which not only his career is built, but his very sense of self — leads to a devastating psychological collapse and a letter, written to his brothers Carl and Johann, known as the Heiligenstadt Testament. In it, Beethoven not only contemplates suicide but also looks at his future and accepts that he will have to create his art under extraordinary circumstances.
 
As well as interviews with Beethoven biographers and scholars such as Jan Swafford and Barry Cooper, the series features contributions and performances from musicians including Iván Fischer, Marin Alsop, the Takács Quartet, Evelyn Glennie, Paul Lewis, Mark Padmore and Chi-chi Nwanoku.


Being Beethoven: Series 1

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