Immortal Beloved (1994)

One of my all time favorites.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

"-Music is... a dreadful thing. What is it? I don't understand it. What does it mean? - It - it exalts the soul. - Utter nonsense. If you hear a marching band, is your soul exalted? No, you march. If you hear a waltz, you dance. If you hear a mass, you take communion. It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer. The listener has no choice. It is like hypnotism. So, now... What was in my mind when I wrote this? Hmm? A man is trying to reach his lover. His carriage has broken down in the rain. The wheels stuck in the mud. She will only wait so long. This... is the sound of his agitation."After 23 years of being released it still amazes me!! This beautiful underrated film, and still one of my top ten movies ever.. Each and every time I watch Immortal Beloved it astonishes me by its great soundtracks - Beethoven's most gorgeous music of course such as Kreutzer sonata, Pathétique sonata, Moonlight sonata, Ode to Joy in the Ninth Symphony and much more -, its lovely atmosphere, its smooth way of storytelling, its good choice of casting and the positives of this movie are endless.... No one in this movie claims that it is the real story of Beethoven, but anyway there was indeed a letter was written by Beethoven to his anonymous lover and so the movie is just giving us a possibility, no one is saying that it's a fact what we saw in the movie, but is it possible?! Is it possible that a letter never reached its destination caused this huge misunderstanding? Is it possible to love in such a strong way? Is it possible to bury your love for all those years but not being able to kill it deep inside of you? Well for a man like Beethoven who could write such an incredible music without hearing a single note of it, I would say everything is possible... In the end of the movie you can't do anything but to put yourself in Beethoven's shoes and see the things from his point of view - which is I am telling you so bloody hard and painful- but you have to do it and that will simply make you a better human being with more sympathy and more understanding toward others... I can't talk about Immortal Beloved without mentioning the greatest actor ever walked on Earth -I don't know about other planets- Gary Oldman the one and only actor who would let you meet Beethoven himself, Mr. Oldman is such an outstanding actor and all his performances are brilliant like Sid Vicious, George Smiley, Jackie Flannery, Shelly Runyon, Lee Harvey Oswald, Norman Stansfield, Drexl Spivey and Milton Glenn..... But him playing Beethoven will always be the performance that took and still takes my breath away!! He literally brought Beethoven from death to life with all his emotions, passion and fantasy. Gary Oldman allowed us all to feel Beethoven's agitation!!!

In 2006 Copying Beethoven by the Polish film director Agnieszka Holland was released. That featured a fictional female character interacting with an aging Beethoven, just prior to the premiere of the 9th Symphony. Immortal Beloved, Bernard Rose's earlier effort from 1994 sticks a bit closer to the historical facts, featuring a Citizen Kane-like investigator attempting to track down the identity of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved," a woman the great composer mentions in a letter discovered after his death, and to whom he left his estate.Anton Schindler (Jeroen Krabbé), Beethoven's private secretary and later his biographer, takes it upon himself to discover the identity of the errant lover by going around interviewing a few suitable candidates, while fighting off the belligerent entreaties of Beethoven's surviving brother. Rose remarks during the DVD commentary that he believes his Schindler character is better than the reporter in Citizen Kane, since the latter is a completely shadowy figure with no real discernible character arc.Schindler first tracks down two of the lovers, Giulietta Guicciardi (Valeria Golino) and Anna Maria Erdody (Isabella Rossellini), who relate their stories of their time spent with Beethoven. Unfortunately, Rose does a poor job of fleshing out the two women and too much time is spent emphasizing Beethoven's romantic passion which must be classified as decidedly generic.There are two good scenes with the women chronicling Beethoven's encroaching deafness: Guicciardi gazing at Beethoven through a peephole as he plays the Moonlight Sonata with his head pressed against the top of the keyboard in an effort to hear something; and Erdody escorting Beethoven out of a concert hall after he messes up conducting an orchestra, again due to his inability to hear anything.In Copying Beethoven, Beethoven's deafness does not appear to be complete, as he utilizes a giant horn to hear faint sounds and can hold a conversation when someone shouts into his ear. But in Immortal Beloved, Rose depicts Beethoven as being completely deaf and suggests to viewers that he may have been subject to awful ringing in his ears similar to tinnitus. This strategy I believe works better than what's depicted in the later film.Rose makes it clear (again on the DVD commentary) that he was committed to presenting a warts and all portrait of Beethoven. While this is an admirable conceit, the problem is that Beethoven is so one-note and surly, that it's quite difficult to engage with such an unsympathetic character. The second half of Immortal Beloved mainly deals with Beethoven's unhappy relationship with his nephew Karl and sister-in-law Johanna (very convincingly played by the Dutch actress Johanna Ter Steege). Beethoven, it seems, attempted to mold Karl into a music prodigy but he was ill-suited to the task; at a certain point Karl unsuccessfully attempts suicide by shooting himself in the head. Rose's big twist here (SUPER SPOILERS AHEAD) is that the Immortal Beloved turns out to be his sister-in-law. Karl in turn ends up as his illegitimate son. In Rose's view, this could explain Beethoven's irrational attachment to his nephew. Historically, this turns of events has been disputed.Immortal Beloved features some lovely individual scenes—the opening funeral sequence and a flashback where a young Beethoven flees his drunken father, lies shirtless in a nearby pond and morphs into a star-filled firmament as Ode to Joy is being sung by its symphonic choir in the background.Gary Oldham is certainly adequate as the tragic composer but is of course saddled by the restrictive narrative. The facts of Beethoven's life may simply not lend themselves to effective drama.All in all, Immortal Beloved is a visually impressive film that lacks both a compelling plot and multi-dimensional characterization. It's worth a view but too much of it is slow-moving without a variety of conflict.

For me - Beethoven stands alone in his genre - especially for his time. Too many historians worry about minute details in a famous person's life - and discredit stories that take a more artistic approach to revealing something about that person.No one knows all there is to know about a man from the 18th and 19th centuries - especially about his inner soul and what drives him to brilliance and raging behavior. The idea that there could have been someone unknown is enticing, and the concept of a film telling about Beethoven through the eyes of others is not a new one, but a format that allows more flexibility. I personally am glad they took this approach. Character development was therefore much more interesting.Oldman's performance was brilliant - and as is often the case with Oldman - you come to feel you are really watching Beethoven. The other personalities also were developed well - and his music was shown in the context of his times - sometimes harsh (his father's beatings) - sometimes tumultuous (the Napoleonic Wars) - sometimes full of love ( the women in his life who did adore him), - and sometimes driven by personal disappointment and anger (the onset of deafness and possibly an unrequited love.....) Beethoven took music to the next level - adding emotion to the beauty and structure already employed by others..... Some are shocked when I say that he was like the Led Zeppelin of the 19th Century - evoking new responses from listeners then, and still one of the few classical composers that you can play for anyone today and they will say "WOW!". Even those who really aren't fans of this kind of music. That is why they chose the 9th Symphony to celebrate the new millennium in 2000 GLOBALLY. Beethoven is universal and timeless. The movie is a wonderful way of sharing a moment with the maestro.

Extraordinary cast. Impressive story. And a great Oldman. A precise ballet behind cages and traps. Delicate tale about love as more than feelings or ordinary fight. Portrait of a genius from sketch to final signature. And drops of music like fundamental character. A movie without definition. A trip fed by gentle touches and shadow of abyss. Build with intelligent science of details, it seems be a good novel. But, step by step, it is more. A cruel love story's faces, description of solitude and vain hope, exercise of cruelty and selfish, slices of pain and force of fly. And a gallery of women's portraits. As pictures of a snail. As games of existence's pieces. The film is wonderful for the gift to be a kind of parable. Beethoven may be everyone. Johanna is every person for who the other is only a geometrical figure.