A new documentary film about one of the greatest composers of all time, Phil Grabsky’s In Search of Beethoven, premiered on Monday at the Barbican Centre in London, makes a vivid companion piece to the same director’s earlier work on Mozart. The films have a good, old-fashioned voice-over narrative, they recount events in the composers’ lives in chronological order, they assemble interviews with some of the world’s greatest musicians, who use their instruments to elucidate their points.

The film, to be broadcast next month on Sky Arts television, contains good soundbites of a non-musical kind. The conductor Roger Norrington, sounding as if he has rehearsed the line many times, makes one of the pithiest remarks about the difference between the two supreme composers in the canon of western music. Mozart, he said, wrote for next Sunday; Beethoven wrote for eternity. Whatever the relative merits of the two musicians, their ambitions were radically different in scope. Mozart would surely have been surprised that we still pay homage to his work, much of it conceived in a spirit of precocious playfulness; Beethoven would have expected nothing less.

There are, of course, more distinct differences. We need only look at the expressions on the musicians’ faces as they attempt to describe the music with which they are so familiar. When they talk about Mozart, their eyebrows routinely rise to the heavens. They are in a celestial world. The music belongs with the gods.

Turn to Beethoven, and the musicians’ brows begin to furrow. They are in the human realm, deeply implicated in the daily struggle to make sense of human existence. Beethoven’s music “brews” and “boils”, occasionally tipping into near-madness, like the composer himself. While there are sublimely beautiful passages in his music, they are punctuated by unease, disturbance, the occasional storm. Here, writ large and loud, is the genesis of the romantic sensibility, the moment when artistic expression turns deeply inward rather than direct itself to the divine.

Beethoven lived, according to his correspondence and diaries, only to turn his art into a lasting legacy. He was frustrated for most of his life by illness and the absence of a fulfilling sexual relationship, and trapped into isolation and depression, largely by his cantankerous nature. He wanted the music to stand apart from his own half-lived life, and develop its own identity, outside time itself.

But the times have a way of pressing the most aloof of artworks into their service. In the past 100 years alone, Beethoven’s music has been hijacked by a bewildering variety of causes. In 1905, German socialists held what they felt was the first “true” premiere of the Ninth Symphony, “by the workers, for the workers”, so that its revolutionary nature could finally be unleashed.

Alas, the Ode to Joy never helped their cause. But it was much admired by the other side: the Weimar authorities loved Beethoven for what they saw as the innate German character of his music, and it became a staple accompaniment to Nazi occasions of state (though Hitler, strangely perfunctory in his praise for Beethoven, preferred to use Wagner).

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Unlike Wagner, Beethoven survived the smear of Nazism, only to run smack into another bunch of unsavoury characters, when the Ninth, again, became the inspiration for the rampaging “droogs” in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. The hapless symphony bounced back yet again, to be played at the Brandenburg Gate during the historic Christmas celebrations of 1989, when conductor Leonard Bernstein, not one to accept subservience to any man or occasion, changed the words of Schiller’s poem, substituting “freedom” for “joy”.

So Beethoven, in a way, has been proved right. His was music to suit all occasions. Not that it was bland; it was the very opposite, possessed of such monumentalism that it has accorded with humanity’s highest – and lowest – ideals, whatever they might have been. This makes him unique among composers, and arguably the greatest among them.

In a bizarre coda to my week of listening to Beethoven, I received a DVD through the post entitled “Beethoven’s Guitar Shred”, which apparently tops the Tower Records music instruction charts. Here was Beethoven’s music performed by The Great Kat, aka Swindon-born Katherine Thomas, a Juilliard-trained musician and one of the fastest “shredders” of all time (“shredding”, for the uninitiated, is very fast guitar playing, normally associated with heavy metal and rarely with Beethoven).

There is indeed a part of Beethoven’s Fifth on the DVD that is played with absurd velocity on an electric guitar. What is rather more striking is The Great Kat’s uniform, a leather dominatrix outfit replete with metal studs, and fishnet tights. Still more notable are some of the other tracks, which include “Torture Techniques”, “Islamofascists” and “Blood”.

Beethoven can never have found himself in odder company than that of The Great Kat, and I amused myself thinking what he would have made of it all. I like to imagine one of his furious temper tantrums. But Mozart, a more ribald soul, would surely have found it hilarious.

peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden