All in Ludwig’s Family : “The Beethovens” takes a new slant on a crisis involving the composer, and finds that his music reflected some basic human needs

Today the headline might read, “Composer Wins Custody of Nephew From Widow in Bitter Court Battle.” But a couple of centuries ago, press coverage was not as detailed as it is today. Ludwig von Beethoven’s struggle to have control over his late brother’s son Karl and to exclude his brother’s widow, Johanna, was not a major news story.

Since then, it has been up to biographers, and sometimes musicologists, to fill in the dark spots in the story. A new play by Frederick Kurth, Valerie Murray and Rebecca Pearson called “The Beethovens,” opening Friday at the Gene Dynarski Theatre, finds a new slant on the musical giant’s family trauma. The production is directed by J. Kevin McMahon, who has directed “Dr. Faustus” in Los Angeles and was a principal member of Santa Monica’s Waterfront Stage-Aresis Ensemble, where he directed “Savage Love” and “Exiles,” among other works.

In the past, musicologists have agreed that the impetus for the transition between Beethoven’s first period and second, the so-called heroic period, was his deafness. It has also been thought that behind the transition to his third and most magnificent period was a developing mysticism or transcendentalism.

The playwrights, Kurth and his two daughters, disagree.

“It’s sex,” says Kurth, a practicing psychiatrist. “I’ve read tons of Beethoven biographies and when they come to the third period, his greatest stuff, they’re all at sea. They come up with all kinds of rubbish.” In Beethoven’s music, Kurth insists, “what he’s talking about is sex, about needing a child, needing a woman. He was talking about these basic human dimensions. They make him sound like he’s a nut in his private life, that he would remove himself to some far-off place and write.

“My point of view is that this is Beethoven at his greatest, and this is Beethoven turned around by this woman who he fought with and this child he got confused with. He was not a nut; he was not a maniac. He was struggling, as we all do, with sexual problems. He needed human creativity with another person. Sexual problems turn up tremendous problems for us.”

Kurth did not start out to be a playwright. Or a psychiatrist. “Everybody in my family was a minister,” he says. “We once made Ripley’s ‘Believe It or Not’ because every generation has a minister. I was the first one who quit the seminary. I was a terrible scandal. If I’d been a minister, I’d have died. So I went into medicine, and I couldn’t stand being in medicine. I finally went into psychoanalysis, and then that died. Psychoanalysis has perished from the earth in many respects--so much of my work now is just doing psychiatry, which is medicines and that kind of stuff. Now I’m in theater.”

Murray is the daughter who became a teacher, and her contribution to the play, she says, is primarily in the area of dialogue. Both her father and sister, Pearson, say she has a flair for it. Pearson, who lives in London and is a molecular biologist, started out in mathematics. Her bailiwick is structural, forcing the formulas to make sense.

The seeds of the project were planted about 1979 when Kurth was working at the Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne. “I was not using drugs with patients,” he says. “We were using only language and mime instead of drugs, so the patients then had a chance to express themselves. Initially, the staff was thrilled. But then the patients put their bad feelings into the staff and pretty soon the place was chaotic. It was like a lynch mob.”

Kurth had long been intrigued with Beethoven and, at the time, with a specific piece of his music. “I read the story of Beethoven, and while he was writing that particular music, he was in a madhouse. He was describing my experiences in the madhouse. So I began to look into Beethoven and found out he presented all kinds of fun problems with his internal world. I came to the realization that he must have been saved by a woman. It turns out that he was saved by his sister-in-law, Johanna, who kept him from really becoming cuckoo. I figured we’re onto something.”

What was he saved from?

“He was saved from grandiosity, from narcissism, from preciousness; he was saved from all kinds of bad states,” Kurth says.

Murray adds, “He was saved from his own omnipotence, that he could do things by himself. A woman came into his life and said, ‘No, you can’t do it alone. You need to have a partner that helps discipline not only yourself, but this product,’ which is the child Karl, the nephew.”

Referring to the transition to Beethoven’s third period, Pearson continues: “The story is about what really brought about that transition, his involvement with Johanna and the child. It’s family. It’s not mysticism, which is what one reads about.

“The press was all for him at the time,” Kurth says, “against this dragon lady, and so forth, this ‘queen of the night,’ this bitch, blah blah blah. Underneath, he loved her deeply, and wanted her, and couldn’t make it work. He was confused by this rivalry for the child and having all these sexual feelings about her. He couldn’t sort them out, but he did in his music.”

McMahon, the director, is a bright, volatile young man, recently married, who says he “just sort of fell into” directing television commercials, industrials and corporate videos when he was 13. Since then, he has concentrated on stage work, but has been returning to film and television in the past couple of years.

He calls “The Beethovens” “an awesome sized project. . . . It’s a director’s play because it’s so big.” The many events that constitute the story had to be brought into focus. His job, however, goes beyond just getting the script on the stage. “I direct for whoever’s going to come in the door. I’ve got to do a story. Who cares if it’s Beethoven? We’ve got to do a story.

“The writers,” he says, “are not so much in love with their play as with their concepts. That’s what I want to translate, their concepts. This has been the most explorative process I’ve ever been in in my life as a director.”

McMahon is also intrigued by Beethoven himself. “People like Beethoven,” he says, “live in a world that does not include us.”