Immortal Beloved (1994)

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I've been looking for this film for quite some time and finally found a copy on DVD. I absolutely love the style of this film. The costumes, the buildings, the interiors is superb and really captures the Vienna of that era. I found a few flaws in this film. For some reason I couldn't follow the plot at the beginning. The girls goes to a concert given by the maestro,, and yet goes into another room and there is Beethoven! Turns out the guy playing the piano was not him, however the actors looks so similar I found it odd. This happened a few times in this film for me.. maybe it's just me. Also there are quite a few historical points that are not accurate. Beethoven was only 57 when he died. But the death bed scene at the beginning makes him like like he is well into his eighties. He wasn't that old. Also, one of the early scenes when he was still quite young hand him placing his ear on the piano just to hear the notes. But he wasn't that deaf at such a young age. His hearing was failing but far from being profoundly deaf. The story line is totally fictitious, which is fine. No one knows who the real immortal beloved was although there are some good guesses. It doesn't matter though, it is still a great story. Also, they try to explain that he was such a miserable person because of his hearing. But notes from the time simply explain he wasn't a pleasant guy to be around. All in all though, I thought this was a terrific period piece of exceptional production values, directing and performances. I wish they made more movies like this.

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.

After the death of Ludwig van Beethoven (Gary Oldman) in 1827, Schindler (Jeroen Krabbé) is tasked with dealing with his last will and testament. He leaves his estate to his "immortal beloved". Schindler sets off to find whoever this immortal beloved may be. He interviews Beethoven's love Giulietta Guicciardi (Valeria Golino), Anna-Marie Erdödy (Isabella Rossellini) as well as others. Johanna Reiss (Johanna ter Steege) is also his lover but she marries his brother Kaspar instead. She has Karl van Beethoven assumed to be Ludwig's son.Oldman is terrific in this luscious costume drama. Beethoven is portrayed as an arrogant bastard which Oldman plays beautifully. However, the plot lacks a certain tension. It depends on how interested one is about finding the identity of this immortal beloved. It doesn't really interest me. There is no denying the ability of Oldman and the beauty in the movie. This doesn't have the clarity of a straight forward biopic or the energy of an exciting plot.

After Beethoven died, love letters he had written to his "Immortal Beloved" were discovered. The name of the Immortal Beloved was not included in the letters. That all makes sense.However, in this film what is found is not letters but a will - in which Beethoven leaves his estate to his Immortal Beloved, but does not tell anyone who she is. Does that make sense to anyone? If he really wanted to leave her his estate, wouldn't it have occurred to him that it maybe it might have been a good idea to identify her by name?Are we supposed to think we was an idiot? Are we, perhaps, supposed to think he wrote the will while suffering from dementia? I can't think of any other reason why he would make a bequest to someone he declined to identify.