Seminal moment in music superbly recreated

At the pinnacle of classical music stand two giants, Mozart the most consummate musician the world will ever know and Beethoven the world’s greatest musical creative genius.

Ian Hart surmounts the challenge of creating the turbulent and usually desperately unhappy Beethoven brilliantly in a career best performance.

Beethoven wrote his symphonies in pairs, the odd numbers being great forward developments in symphonic writing, matched by the more relaxed even numbered symphonies.

In the course of this rehearsal we glimpse all the aspects of Beethoven’s life, his passionate but hopeless love affairs, his poverty, his aggressive assertiveness of his genius that won him few friends where he needed them most, the first signs of his total deafness and a precursor of the long illnesses of his later life.

In Hart’s performance we see all this tragedy, and also glimpse the astounding way it was turned into works of genius by Beethoven’s indomitable spirit. The more he suffered the greater his music became, culminating in the sublime late string quartets.

Absolutely every actor in the film, even the silent part of a maid, plays their part and contributes to the whole. Direction, setting and period orchestral playing is nigh flawless.