Beethoven
The Genius of Beethoven is a 3 part docudrama miniseries which aired on the BBC in 2005. Each episode covers a segment of Beethoven’s life, from his youth, to his mid years, to his later life, but for me each episode was progressively less interesting.
The first episode was quite solid, mostly because it emphasized the storytelling and didn’t spend a significant amount of time cutting away to the talking head narrator explaining music theory, like the later episodes did far too much. The first episode showed his piano duel with Daniel Steibelt, and featured a good performance from Paul Rhys.
The documentary aspect of the miniseries felt like the weakest part to me. It feels silly to see actors pretending to be 1800’s people being interviewed by a documentary crew in 2000, plus these documentary segments distract from the narrative flow.
This miniseries proposes Antonie as Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved, and they spend a big part of the 3rd episode showing how bad of a Father/Uncle Beethoven was to Karl. Being a documentary, its pretty historically accurate, and the first episode also worked reasonably well as a narrative, but it could certainly stand to be made as a full fledged narrative.