Immortal Beloved

The piece Beethoven explains through the story of a carriage stuck in the mud on the day Schindler first meets him. On the album it appears under the scene title “The Carriage Stuck in the Mud.”

• The piece plays two key roles in the film. First it serves as a parable that teaches how to listen to music; later it returns with Schindler's tears. Recurring to point to a character or event, the same music works like a leitmotif (guiding motive).
• Violin and piano do not split into accompaniment and melody but trade phrases as equals, as if sparring. The story of an eager heart pitted against mud that holds it back is heard folded neatly into this exchange.
• The premiere in 1803 was given by the violinist George Bridgetower, but on publication the work was dedicated to the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer. Kreutzer himself, it is said, never played it.
• So strongly has the piece been heard as music of tempestuous love and jealousy that Tolstoy named a novella after it, “The Kreutzer Sonata.”

The scene in which Giulietta and her father, hiding, watch Beethoven play and discover that he is going deaf. The album title is “Julia and Her Father Watch.”

• The right hand keeps up an unbroken stream of broken chords (arpeggios), spreading each chord out one note at a time in groups of three. Above it floats a slow melody. This hushed flow heightens the breathless tension of the spying scene.
• Beethoven did in fact dedicate this sonata to Giulietta Guicciardi. The film took that historical dedication as its starting point in building the scene between them.
• The nickname “Moonlight” was not Beethoven's. It took hold after his death, when the critic Ludwig Rellstab likened this movement to moonlight on a lake. The subtitle Beethoven gave it was 'Quasi una fantasia.'
• Beethoven playing with his head pressed to the piano's body is a gesture of trying to feel the vibrations with his body in place of ears that can no longer hear. In this scene, how sound is heard becomes the story itself.

The piece that drives the Napoleonic Wars and the shelling of Vienna, released as the album's first track, “Napoleon Shells Vienna.”

• A four-note motif — three short notes followed by one long — drives the whole movement. In this film the motif sounds like the beat of gunfire and marching troops.
• Splitting, layering, and piling up a single short motif into a vast movement is a hallmark of Beethoven's craft. The film turns this relentless repetition into the momentum of war.
• The symphony premiered at a concert in Vienna in December 1808, on the same evening as the Sixth, the “Pastoral.” In the film, too, the two symphonies form a pair, one scoring war and the other a family quarrel.
• Solti recorded the complete Beethoven symphonies twice with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. For this film he made a new recording with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Plays as Beethoven comforts Countess Erdődy after the loss of her child. The album title is “Ludwig Consoles Anna Marie.”

• A trio for three instruments — piano·violin·cello. The album's performers listed for it are Emanuel Ax, Pamela Frank, and Yo-Yo Ma.
• The piano lays down a low tremolo (a trembling note), rapidly repeating a single pitch. Above it the strings draw out a slow, dark melody. It sounds less like consolation than music that grieves alongside.
• The nickname “Ghost” comes from the eerie atmosphere of this slow movement. Beethoven's pupil Czerny likened it to the ghost scene in “Hamlet.” Beethoven's sketchbooks from the same period also hold plans for a “Macbeth” opera.
• Beethoven did in fact dedicate this trio to Countess Erdődy. The intimacy between the two in the film is an imagining that begins from this dedication.

Used in the scene of Beethoven's violent fight with his brother Caspar. The album title is “Ludwig and Caspar Fight.”

• The timpani, silent through all three preceding movements, sound for the first time in this one. The sense of thunder suddenly bursting in comes from that long-saved instrument.
• The piccolo, the small flute that sounds the highest notes of all, cuts in sharply to paint the wind and the lightning.
• In the middle of a symphony that depicts the calm of the countryside, a storm breaks loose. The film transposes this sudden change of weather into a rage that erupts within a family.
• In the actual symphony, the storm gives way without pause to the shepherd's song of thanksgiving. The quarrel in the film finds no such reconciliation so soon.

It plays as the cornered nephew Karl makes his way to the ruins of a castle. On the soundtrack album the track is titled “Karl at the Ruins.”

• A rhythm of 'long-short-short-long-long' repeats stubbornly from beginning to end. This dogged repetition of a single figure is called an ostinato (stubborn repetition). It is well suited to depicting a pressure there is no escaping.
• Over a melody that begins quietly in the low strings, instruments join one by one and the texture steadily thickens. It sounds like the weight Karl carries piling up, layer upon layer.
• At the 1813 premiere, the story goes, the audience demanded that this movement be played again as an encore. Many films since, The King's Speech among them, have used it.
• It is a minor-key movement set at the heart of a major-key symphony. In this film the movement serves almost as Karl's theme.

The premiere of the Ninth Symphony. As the chorus sounds, a flashback of the young Beethoven floating on a starlit lake is laid over it. It is the album's final track, “The Night of the Premiere.”

• This is the movement in which the human voice first entered the symphony. A baritone soloist opens the singing with what sounds like a cry, dismissing the darkness of the preceding movements and calling for songs of joy. The chorus then sings, in Schiller's words, of the brotherhood of all humankind.
• At this point the film shows the boy's night instead of the stage. As the music swells, the camera recedes toward the sky, and the boy, floating among the stars reflected in the lake, is left small. It is often cited as one of the great unions of music and image in film history.
• The joy melody is first brought forth quietly by the low strings, without accompaniment. Instruments then join in turn and the same tune grows ever larger; this design of building a single melody through repetition drives the scene's ascent.
• There is an anecdote that at the actual premiere the alto Caroline Unger turned Beethoven, who stood with his back to the audience, around to face it. The film carries the scene over just as it is told.

The film's love theme, heard over the letter's final journey and the end credits. On the album it appears as “The Letter,” running more than 11 minutes.

• In the second movement, muted strings lay down hushed, hymnlike chords, and above them the piano sings its melody as if speaking to itself. It sounds like a voice reading a love letter aloud.
• At the end of the second movement the piano foreshadows the theme of the next movement very slowly, then passes without a break into the vigorous third movement. It is the moment a quiet confession bursts into joy.
• The nickname “Emperor” was not Beethoven's own. His hearing failing, Beethoven could not play the solo himself at the work's premiere. The pain of the rehearsal scene in the film comes back to mind along with this piece.
• The choice of the intimate second movement over the majestic first as the love theme is striking. Behind the work's grand name, the film lets us hear its quietest part.