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

Ross Wilson

Flora Stewart

Phil Cairney

Matchlight

Being Beethoven: Series 1: Episode 3

Episode 3

BBC Four - Being Beethoven, Series 1, Episode 3

As Beethoven begins his late masterpieces, his desire for a family becomes an obsession.

As Beethoven embarks on the extraordinary flowering of his late music, his health deteriorates and his desire for love and family tips over into obsession.

'We are not in a good state…' 

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 3 finds the composer unmoored and - personally and creatively - desperate to regain control in his every aspect of his life. In 1815, the death of his brother is the catalyst for a long and bitter legal battle for custody of Beethoven's nephew, Karl. What follows is a protracted period during which the composer’s desire for love and family tip over into obsession. Beethoven will, of course, embark on the extraordinary flowering of the late music - the Missa solemnis, the late quartets and the Ninth 'Choral' Symphony - but he doesn’t know that yet. 

Musical highlights include Paul Lewis exploring the beauty and brutality of one of the greatest works of the piano repertoire, the Diabelli Variations, and the Takács Quartet playing the sublime Hymn of Thanksgiving.

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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Being Beethoven

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