Pieces of Beethoven

PIECES OF BEETHOVEN:

featuring Sir Andras Schiff, Steven Isserlis, Gabriela Montero, Steven Osborne and the Kammerphilharmonie Bremen with Paavo Järvi

Two hundred years ago Beethoven died, and fans and scavengers descended, hunting for souvenirs. Our film for the bicentenary starts with his death, and explores how the scattered fragments of his manuscripts - and hair - are being tracked down and deciphered, through a magical marriage of dedicated scholarship and brand-new technology. The story circles around his Eroica Symphony, written at a moment of great crisis, and cementing his reputation as the first, and greatest, artist hero of Western music.

When Beethoven dies in March 1827, he's the most famous musician in Europe, and worshippers flock to pay homage - with scissors. Three days later, he's completely bald; everyone wants a piece of him.

His celebrity arises from the time and place, as well as his talent. Beethoven bursts on the scene as the Enlightenment is set on fire by French revolutionary ideas. As Napoleon approaches, German Romanticism is born, and with it the idea of the artist creator, the bridge between mortals and God. Beethoven is the perfect embodiment of this; unlike his predecessors, Haydn and Mozart, writing to order as servants of the nobility, Beethoven declares that his talent makes him the equal of any aristocrat.

He writes what he wants, when he wants - and then invites patrons to pay for it.

So, he can spend months, or years, working and reworking a single piece; and all those notes and ideas are in a vast hoard of musical sketchbooks, which he cherishes and takes with him on his constant moves around Vienna (he's a noisy, alarming and unpopular neighbour). When the sketchbooks are scattered at his death, the secret of Beethoven's genius vanishes too.

But today, forensic science, musical detective work and passionate perseverance are putting the pieces back together. At the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, we discover how ink blots, quill shapes and apparently random scribbles are clues to what goes where.

Lewis Lockwood and Alan Gosman spent two decades decoding the sketchbook for the Eroica Symphony: the composer's blazing refusal to be defeated by his failing hearing, tearing up the musical rules as he does so. They show us Beethoven developing his ideas, note by note, and Paavo Järvi and the Kammerphilharmonie Bremen orchestra demonstrate his different versions of the great fanfare that announces the final movement.

But what comes then? A whispered tune, so simple it can be plucked on a violin string. Beethoven takes that tune and develops it, first into an intricate set of piano variations, and then into the barnstorming finale of his symphony. How? Through improvising on the piano. Beethoven was more famous as an improviser than a composer in his day - but because there was no way to record his performances in the moment, most of them are lost.

Today's unchallenged virtuosa of improvisation is Gabriela Montero. She's never played this piece of Beethoven - until now. We watch her explore what Beethoven does with it, adding a few suggestions of her own. And Gabriela has a computer connected to her piano, so everything she improvises is preserved and transcribed, to feed into her own compositions.

Meanwhile, what of the hair? Locks of 'Beethoven's Hair' have been passed down through generations. Tristan Begg, a young Beethoven obsessive, reads the Heiligenstadt Testimony, in which Beethoven pours out his his hopes that one day, doctors will find out why he suffers so badly with his health.

Tristan is a palaeogeneticist, working in the lab where the Neanderthal genome has just been sequenced. He realises that he may be able to do the same for Beethoven, using these carefully guarded scraps of hair. But the first four he gets hold of turn out all to have totally different DNA; only one is Beethoven's - but which? Eventually, one of them matches another with a reliable provenance, which delivers the answer to Beethoven's final illness: a tendency to liver disease, complicated by a Hepatitis B infection - and mysteriously high levels of lead.

Enter Carol Albrecht, who has spent decades translating the 'conversation books' Beethoven used after he became deaf. Carol shows us Beethoven's Vienna, and tells us about the detective work involved, revealing that Beethoven, though not a heavy drinker by the standards of his day, liked his wine sweetened - with lead.

So, by the time Beethoven goes to work on his late piano masterpiece, the 'Diabelli' Variations, he's old and ill, in constant pain. Back at the Beethoven-Haus, we see how slowly he is now working, how much less confident he is of his ideas; it's full of notes not just crossed out but scratched completely away with a knife, to make sure only the right version gets to the printer.

And in between, there are scribbles in different pens and in red chalk, notes to himself - it's a total mess. But somewhere in there is a record of the ageing Beethoven, developing his immortal 9th Symphony. How to make sense of it?

Once again, technology comes to the rescue; Susanne Cox at the 'Beethovens Werkstatt' project has invented a piece of software that analyses and separates all the different elements on a page. We watch and listen as every element magically sounds in turn - and then international virtuoso Steven Osborne performs it for us; one moment lyrical, the next as radical as Steven's other love, modern jazz.

There's another mystery in the Diabelli sketchbook: fingerings - for Beethoven himself. Why would he have composed at the piano, when he was already stone deaf?

David Ginty runs the neuroscience lab at Harvard, and recently discovered that certain kinds of touch are processed with hearing, in the brain. Beethoven heard through his hands.

But why he lost his hearing is the biggest mystery of all. We film Tristan back in the lab with a newly-discovered scrap of hair, that seems to have fallen onto a manuscript page when Beethoven was shaving, at the time he first realised he was losing his hearing. Whatever is in his DNA at that moment should throw light on the deafness.

We end the film with the end of the Eroica symphony, which we've seen and heard developing, from first illegible scribblings to finished manuscript. Famously, Beethoven scrubbed out his original dedication, to Napoleon, and just called it 'Eroica' - 'Heroic'. It's a fitting description of Beethoven himself, struggling and persevering, checking every note and marking until he's satisfied.

But the other heroes of this story are the musicians and scholars who dedicate years, or decades, of their lives to deciphering scattered fragments on fragile scraps of paper that have survived two centuries; and thanks to them, we understand why Beethoven still towers above all other composers, as we're transported inside the head of Western music's greatest genius, hearing his music as never before.