Stage and Screen Recommendations

Why Beethoven Deserves an Oscar

The Oscar nominations have come out for 2010, and The King’s Speech came out ahead with an astonishing 12 nominations. Among them, composer Alexandre Desplat receive a nod for his score, which he had received previously for another film about English royalty, The Queen. It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe his career could end up scoring the entire English monarchy.

But there was one omission that Desplat’s deserved nomination forgot to mention: What, no Beethoven?

A little backstory…

Classical music has long been the source material in film scores. Film composer Dimitri Tiomkin famously delivered this Oscar acceptance speech, “I would like to thank Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Strauss, Rimsky-Korsakov.”

Yet Beethoven’s music has a drama so all its own that I don’t think it works well in scores. Sure, there are exceptions. The sixth symphony has been especially overused to score scenes of idyllic nature or stormy weather. Best of all, Beethoven’s ninth was masterfully deconstructed in the classic film Die Hard (seriously, Michael Kamen deserved an Oscar).

However, Immortal Beloved, a film that sought to do for Beethoven what Amadeus did for Mozart, was a brilliant film visually but failed to capture what was Beethovenian about Beethoven. Indeed, the implicit comparison with Mozart, whose music is famous for nearly being able to score anything (everything from Out of Africa to a Pixar short to a Nike commercial), was particularly humbling. It’s telling that the most famous movie Beethoven is not the composer, but a Saint Bernard.

But one film changed that opinion for me. When I saw the trailer for The Soloist, I heard typical classical music used (Bach’s G major cello prelude) and Stevie Wonder. It didn’t prepare me for the fact that The Soloist‘s entire score is based on Beethoven’s third symphony! The “Eroica” (or “heroic”) as Beethoven called it is Beethoven’s most underrated work, arguably greater than better known works such as his ninth and fifth symphonies. In The Soloist, Dario Marianelli mined the third’s marvelous dark, brooding, and propulsive qualities, heavy metal before such things existed.

The King’s Speech continues this trend with possibly the best use of unedited Beethoven yet. The filmmakers used the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony, another dark propulsive movement that was so popular in his day that Beethoven encored it at its premiere. The music feels incredibly modern as it builds from its nearly one-note melody into an epic size, taking us on a tense uninterrupted journey in a pivotal sequence in The King’s Speech (I won’t say which one to prevent spoilers. I also won’t comment on the potential meaning and ironies of using a German composer for this scene.) It’s also followed by another Beethoven piece (2nd movement of Beethoven’s fifth piano concerto).

I wonder how this filmmaking decision went down. “Sorry, Alex, Beethoven’s got this scene.” I also wonder how many people were enthralled with the score but didn’t know they had just listened to a 300-year old classical piece. My mere hope is that when Alexandre Desplat wins (actually, my bet would be on Hans Zimmer for Inception), he does the honorable thing at the awards podium: thank Beethoven.

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Tags: Alexandre Desplat, Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Dario Marianelli, Dimitri Tiomkin, Michael Kamen, Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakov, Stevie Wonder, Strauss, Wagner