Pieces of Beethoven

Filming is underway on 'Pieces of Beethoven', which celebrates Beethoven's bicentenary in 2027. Please get in touch if you want to get involved.

Principal photography is underway on 'Pieces of Beethoven', which celebrates Beethoven’s bicentenary in 2027. Filming to date includes with Paavo Järvi conducting the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, in previously unknown versions of the Eroica Symphony finale, and Gabriela Montero playing the Op 35 Eroica Variations that inspired the symphony. Explaining how it arose from Beethoven's improvisations, she improvises her own variations in response. Musicologists Alan Gosman and Lewis Lockwood describe the challenges of their seven-year project to make sense of the Eroica sketchbook, while Harvard professor of neurobiology David Ginty inspires us with his discovery that we can hear through our hands.

Still to come are Steven Osborne exploring the Diabelli Variations, with reference to his own passion for jazz (and his own 'hearing via the hands').

Then Vienna, to describe Beethoven's erupting onto the music scene with the backdrop of the French Revolution, his 70 moves around the city, the conversation books that reveal his problems with adulterated wine, and the walks in nature that inspired his music. Old and new meet in Bonn, where brand new software digitally decodes his manuscripts and reconstructs his compositional process, including the first appearance of the Ode to Joy. Finally, we visit the University of Leuwen, where pioneering techniques reveal how a single hair can trace the progress of Beethoven's final illness - and that he wasn't actually a Beethoven.

Directed by Sheila Hayman.
Shot in 4K.
52 and 90 Minute versions.
Distributed by Poorhouse International.