Thanks to Filmmakers, Composer’s Life Still a Mystery : ‘Immortal Beloved’ Makes a Shambles of the Truth

If only Beethoven could sue for defamation, the producers of Hollywood’s latest genius-as-nut film, “Immortal Beloved,” might be in line with Orange County at bankruptcy court. The film accuses Beethoven of illegitimately fathering his nephew by carrying on with the woman who became his sister-in-law, whom it identifies as his immortal beloved. It depicts Beethoven as an utterly dislikable fellow who abused this nephew, mercilessly driving him to become a virtuoso pianist, while doing little himself.

In the film, Beethoven’s abuse earns the enmity of Vienna, where he is kicked by children and lies in the streets in a stupor. Beethoven, in real life a staunch democrat and a passionate supporter of the revolutions sweeping Europe, is even cynically accused in the film of crudely rigging the proceedings in an ugly custody fight with his sister-in-law/lover by illicitly seeking the intervention of the arch-monarchist autocrat Count Metternich with a phony promise of glory for the count in a future musical extravaganza.

What is so offensive about this film is that it will not be widely recognized as a gigantic fiction in very poor taste but as something approaching the truth. In fact, the truth is hard to come by in this film.

In reality, research concerning the identity of Beethoven’s real “immortal beloved” has always centered on several aristocratic women, each of whom was well beyond the social and economic reach of a commoner such as Beethoven. Why it is necessary to twist this tragic and touching aspect of Beethoven’s life into something unsavory is inexplicable, unless the producers simply wished to avoid comment on the injustices of the social system in 19th-Century Europe and the deplorable position of even a genius of Beethoven’s stature.

Was this the reason for the fact that the film’s major reference to the actual history of the times was a Napoleonic cannonball flattening an aristocratic boy in a palace to the thunder of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?

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Even in musical terms, the film was inaccurate. The cannonball scene was part of a sequence showing a disgusted Beethoven’s erasure of the Bonaparte name from his Eroica Symphony, which was his third and not the fifth of this genre.

This is not the only farce of this kind. In “Amadeus,” which was first a play and then a film by the same name, Mozart was portrayed as a giggly brat unable to control his sexual and alcoholic appetites who brought upon himself the enmity of others, including fellow musicians, through his childish and egotistical pranks.

The play (and film) then present the fantastic fiction that Mozart was killed by one such envious fellow musician. Thus conveniently spared are the Hapsburg monarchy and Vienna’s aristocracy, which, contrary to the film’s implication, increasingly shunned Mozart following a spate of democratic operas (“Marriage of Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “The Magic Flute”) and forced him into a position of growing financial difficulties, ultimately culminating in the state of abject destitution in which he died.

As it turns out, the truth about the greatest composers is far more fascinating than any imaginable fictionalization of their lives. Johann Sebastian Bach was arrested and confined for several weeks owning to a dispute with his tyrannical employer in Weimar. When he died, Bach left his family in such terrible economic straits that the unearned portion of his salary once was reclaimed from his widow by the burghers who ran the city of Leipzig. And even after his son had auctioned off a not insubstantial number of his compositions (thereby scattering them to the winds), there was so little money left over that the remaining kids were farmed out to relatives and Bach’s widow became homeless.

The observation that truth is more interesting than fiction applied to Beethoven as well. The producers of “Immortal Beloved” missed a great opportunity to show the police commissioner upholding the autocratic power of the despotic monarchial regime by commanding the audience at the Vienna world premiere of Beethoven’s humanistic and universalist Ninth Symphony to stop its enthusiastic ovations because they were twice as long as the applause customarily accorded the royal family, whose theater box was conspicuously empty for this concert.

“Immortal Beloved” represents a low point in an already well-established tradition of cultural know-nothingism in which truth is sacrificed to fiction.

The film’s main saving grace was “Amadeus’ ” as well: the glories of old Prague, where both films were made. But why was it necessary to demean a giant who is an eternal inspiration to all humanity?