The 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth finds an agreeable tribute in the German television film “Louis van Beethoven,” available now on VOD. That first name isn’t a typo: It’s the everyday moniker for Ludwig we hear throughout writer-director Niki Stein’s biopic of the legendary composer, which juxtaposes his latter days as an irascible, lonely, deaf artist plagued by debts and family infighting with his early growth as a prodigy.
We first encounter the middle-aged Beethoven (Tobias Moretti) in a mood on the way to his younger brother’s countryside home an emotionally fragile nephew (Peter Lewys Preston) in tow, a sonata for money still unfinished. A letter from an old flame sparks the threaded-in flashbacks to boyhood days of promise and bitter lessons in late 18th