Copying Beethoven

A film set in Vienna in 1824. Beethoven is about to finish a symphony. The date of the premiere is set and the orchestral parts have still not been copied out. A copyist is needed. The publisher sends someone. The person who arrives is a woman. Anna is a student at the conservatoire and wants to compose. Beethoven will not have her. Then he sees she has corrected an error in his notation and changes his mind. From there the film is a story about work. Notebooks, fair copies, rehearsals and endless corrections. The man cannot hear. He has been deaf for years and cannot follow what is happening in the rehearsal room. The premiere is the centre. Beethoven wants to conduct and it is plain that he cannot. The solution is this: Anna stands in the pit within his line of sight and gives him the beat. He conducts by watching her. The scene is held long and is almost unbroken. What the narrative is interested in is not genius but transmission: its idea is how the music gets from the man's head into the hall, and who carries it. Anna is invented. No such copyist ever existed and the film makes her up entirely; that is what the production was most criticised for. Beethoven is not drawn as likeable. He is coarse, filthy, selfish and treats everyone around him badly. The last section moves to another work. He is writing the late string quartets and nobody understands him. Ed Harris, Diane Kruger, Matthew Goode and Ralph Riach are in the cast. Agnieszka Holland directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes classical music and films about composers. Who it is not for: anyone expecting historical accuracy; the central character is invented and the narrative presents her as fact.