Louis Van Beethoven
Colin Pütz) grows up in provincial Bonn, Germany. Singer and actor
Tobias Pfeiffer and organist
Christian Gottlob Neefe take on the young genius after attempts to teach him by his father fail. Ludwig learns to go his own way, but offends society.
A momentous encounter with
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the political upheavals of the time aroused a freedom-loving spirit in the young Beethoven. The missed love for a young noblewoman and a series of family tragedies almost made Ludwig give up until he moved to Vienna for an apprenticeship with composer
Joseph Haydn.
All this is embedded in a framework story in which the older Beethoven (
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