CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
HOLLYWOOD has enshrined famous composers in romantic=20 titles: Chopin in Song to Remember; Brahms and Schumann in=20 Song of Love; Liszt in Song Without End and now Beethoven=20 in Immortal Beloved. But perhaps the chief influences on=20 writer/director Bernard Rose are Peter Shaffer and Milos=20 Forman, whose film about Mozart was called Amadeus, beloved=20 of God. The father figure in Amadeus has been replaced by a=20 mysterious woman who, it is claimed, influenced Beethoven’s=20
The tendency to find autobiographical meanings for so much=20 of Beethoven’s music is over-simplistic and hateful. Apart=20 from this, the film is ineptly made and poorly acted except=20 for Gary Oldman as Beethoven and Johanna Ter Steege as=20 Joanna van Beethoven. Jeroen Krabbe plays Anton Schindler=20 who compiles a list of women who might qualify as=20 Beethoven’s muse.
Although the film aims to make its subject spiritual, it=20 is, in fact, secular and mundane. Only the music, performed=20 under the supervision of Sir Georg Solti, sounds=20 resplendent, even though it all belongs to a greatest hits=20 compilation. The dogged earnestness with which the film=20 treats the composer suggests a more appropriate title might=20 have been Beethoven III.