That Was It

For music buffs it seemed that October was going to be Beethoven month on television and at the movies. Ovation was broadcasting Daniel Barenboim’s series of concerts in which he played all the sonatas at the Berlin Staatsoper. These dated back to 2006, but it remains a continuing story. Barenboim played the cycle again in 2008 in London, and plans a further series of concerts for January 2010 (again in London) in which he will play all the concertos, conducting from the keyboard, some of which we will almost certainly see in one medium or another. Then there was the unfortunately limited release of Phil Grabsky’s documentary In Search of Beethoven. At the time of writing it is screening in only two cinemas in Sydney but has been attracting nearly full houses on weekends. Then came the international release of This Is It, the film of Michael Jackson’s rehearsals for the concert tour that would have begun in July had the singer not died six days before he was due to open in Los Angeles.

Beethoven upstaged by a vulgar pop star? Not a bit of it. I know many young people who revere Beethoven but are also deeply moved by Michael Jackson. This Is It shows Jackson as a razor-sharp professional at the top of his game; anything but the pill-popping eccentric of the gossip columns. Part documentary, part concert video, This Is It uses rehearsal footage shot by three camera crews to reconstruct the concerts Jackson planned for his world tour. Also included is some of the film that was to be incorporated in the presentations. There is a deliciously scarifying reworking of the Thriller video with dear old Vincent Price’s “rap” voice-over describing graves opening; and very good he is too—again! Even more fun are the “Smooth Criminal” inserts with Michael trading shots with Humphrey Bogart (from The Big Sleep), catching Rita Hayworth’s glove (from Gilda) and being pursued by Edward G. Robinson (from Little Caesar). Finally, there is touchingly sentimental film of a child in an impossibly idealised rain forest that is destroyed by bulldozers, one of which appears jaws agape on stage behind Jackson.

We see more of what was planned for the concert when co-director Ken Ortega (who also directs the film) runs the fire special effects with all the delight of a boy playing with his first train set. However, the dance numbers are performed in rehearsal clothes with only Jackson wearing a variety of coats (to try out some of his characteristic moves) and without any pyrotechnics or special lighting. These sequences were shot very simply from a variety of angles and cut together to achieve as complete a coverage as possible. The result is that the dancing and choreography appear much stronger here than they would have in the live production or even if the routines had been shot and edited in the flashier style of a concert or music video. This is often done to cover up deficiencies in the dancers and choreography. Here there are few if any failings. Jackson sensibly doesn’t dance full out but does enough to remind us that he was one of the great dancers of his era. (One of his early admirers was Fred Astaire.) The backup dancers, who we first see being told they are expected to be extensions of Jackson, turn out to be superb. My regular companion, a dancer herself, found their performances in the early rehearsals as exciting as Jackson’s, at least before he came to dominate the routines.

Was Michael Jackson having this backstage film shot “for his archives” to prepare the way for a simpler kind of production that placed the emphasis on the dancers and the choreography? We may never know, but it works splendidly for This Is It. Some of the most fascinating footage is of Jackson directing the show, involving himself in every detail of the presentation from the exact phrasing of a passage of music—“just refer to the record”—or tactfully signalling his partner in one of the songs to turn her face to the audience for the finale of their duet, to the lighting—“I’ll need to cue this,” he says, indicating that a spotlight is to come on in time with one of his gestures.

According to Ortega, the film is a “musical mosaic”: “We took the remnants of what we had and constructed a musical story … it doesn’t have a plot line although it is definitely a story. It is a story of a master of his craft, a great genius in his final theatrical work.” This is portrayed not just in the music and dance but also in Jackson’s own words as he explains why he is including particular songs or staging certain dances. When asked if there was anything about Jackson in the eighty hours of footage that he did not want to show, Ortega replied, “It’s unguarded and it’s raw, and it’s not always pretty … The real answer to that question would be ‘no’.”

For me these unguarded moments only serve to enhance Jackson’s stature. At times he seems vulnerable, such as when he complains about being in pain from the sound in his earpiece, but Ortega also allows us to see Jackson’s steely authority. A musician says, “It’s getting there, it’s getting there.” “Get there,” Jackson snaps.

Jackson conserves his voice for most of the shoot, but in one delightful sequence he allows himself to be coaxed into a full-on rendition of “Billie Jean” for the stage crew. “I shouldn’t be doing this,” he protests, and then to everyone’s delight lets it rip, giving us a glimpse of the concert performance he was never to give.

Back in the 1980s when Jackson made his most famous music videos the medium was primitive. Clips were short, with random images cut in rhythm to the music. All this changed when Jackson made Thriller with John Landis—a gruesome black comedy based on the song—and Bad with Martin Scorsese. To be sure, the imagery was derivative: borrowings from the Universal horror movies in Thriller and a major debt to the gang war film The Warriors in Bad. But they were witty and clever and helped to extend the medium artistically, not to mention literally—both videos were significantly longer than the usual fare. Even so, everything was still abbreviated. Jackson might borrow Fred Astaire’s moves in the Girl Hunt Ballet from The Band Wagon (all freely admitted; Jackson was anything but a plagiarist). But even in his concerts Jackson never developed his ideas the way Astaire and his collaborators did in the routines they devised for the classic musicals. He would come up with one or two sensational moves and that would be it. This Is It shows him and his collaborators beginning to move away from the straitjacket of the music video to develop a freer style that would expand their audiences’ awareness.

Even after Jackson’s innovations the music video is still a debased form of visual expression. It fragments the viewers’ attention with its disconnected images and the pulsating high-intensity sound, all of which act like some kind of hallucinogenic drug. Jackson broke away from much of this with Thriller and Bad, although both are nightmare visions. But they are shot in sequences and have few if any discontinuous shots. With This Is It, however, Jackson seems to have been going even further. He was not re-enacting his music videos on stage but expanding the choreography and film inserts to create much fuller musical narratives. Sadly, this hugely talented man was confined to music videos and concerts and was never able to direct and star in the kind of film he loved so much that would have given his art full rein—a Hollywood musical.

Ken Ortega’s fine film may have begun as an attempt to tell the story of Jackson’s last concert but it has become an invaluable portrait of a man who, for all his troubles, was a consummate professional and a considerable artist whose work was continuing to evolve.

Coupling Michael Jackson with Beethoven might seem to be ludicrous. But, as Phil Grabsky’s In Search of Beethoven demonstrates, the great composer was, like Jackson, something of a superstar. When Beethoven furiously erased the dedication to Napoleon on the title page of the Third Symphony, the story went all over Europe, heartening his fellow countrymen at a time when Austria was being regularly humiliated by the French emperor. He was also a virtuoso pianist, possibly the greatest who has ever lived. Those fiendishly difficult passages in the sonatas were written for himself and, as one of Grabsky’s interviewees points out, to embarrass his rivals who couldn’t play them. Towards the end of his career Beethoven was invited to play and conduct at the Congress of Vienna, and at the premiere of the Ninth Symphony the police silenced the crowd after the composer received more ovations than were accorded the Emperor of Austria.

But this is about as far as it goes, and inevitably This Is It and In Search of Beethoven are very different films.

Grabsky’s method, first seen in his 2006 documentary In Search of Mozart, is to create a musical biography by journeying to the houses and cities in which the composers lived and to film extracts from their works played by various modern orchestras, whenever possible in those same locales. These are intercut with interviews with musicians, conductors and musicologists. There are no re-enactments; instead the composer’s letters are read—performed really—as a voice-over. This works quite well in the Mozart film, as the composer wrote almost exclusively on commission for specific occasions. Grabsky also refutes the version of Mozart’s life depicted in the film Amadeus. He may have been free and easy about money but, Grabsky’s experts insist, Mozart was never a pauper and for most of his life was a successful, highly regarded composer and musician.

As he explains on the commentary track of the DVD, Grabsky has no special expertise in music. He does all his own filming, covering a performance with two cameras then cutting between them in the editing. He likes to get in close, with tightly framed shots of hands gliding across piano keys, bows being drawn across strings and the faces of musicians in the throes of creativity filling the screen. For my taste there are far too many shots of expressways and modern crowds in the film on Mozart, but the many fine performances in the film show how the composer’s music remains a vital part of European life.

Applied to In Search of Beethoven, Grabsky’s method is painfully limited. The earlier film dramatised Mozart’s life with readings from his own, his father’s and his wife Costanze’s letters linked by an admirably concise commentary delivered by Juliet Stevenson. In Search of Beethoven has only the composer’s letters and the commentary. Stevenson is as good as ever but she can’t work miracles. The music is played splendidly but in frustratingly short extracts. There are fascinating observations by Grabsky’s array of experts but they are never really developed, and few of the commentators are placed in any kind of meaningful context. When we see the musicians or singers discuss a piece they have just performed, that is probably context enough; but nowhere in the interview with Sir Roger Norrington are we told that he conducted the first performance of all the Beethoven symphonies on original instruments—and this in a film where orchestras playing on modern and original instruments are used interchangeably. A pianist in the Mozart film does describe the size of the eighteenth-century piano and the narration mentions Beethoven’s letters to piano manufacturers pleading for bigger and louder instruments when the composer began to lose his hearing, but with Norrington available, along with the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, the differences in the sound of modern and period instruments should have been at least mentioned, if not explored, in both films.

These limitations become more glaring when In Search of Beethoven is compared with Leonard Bernstein and Humphrey Burton’s 1970 television documentary Beethoven’s Birthday, now available on DVD as part of Leonard Bernstein: The Concert Collection on the discs labelled “Bernstein in Vienna”. The film is built around the conductor’s involvement in the celebrations for the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth in which he is to play the First Piano Concerto, conduct a performance of Fidelio in the opera house where it was first performed, and finally conduct a performance of the Ninth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Bernstein and Burton use a series of portraits of Beethoven as a young then older man, along with contemporary etchings and shots of the many houses and inns where the composer stayed, to illustrate a narrative describing the contrast between the great composer’s tortured private life and his sublime music. Bernstein’s exuberant performance of the First then portrays the young virtuoso. A living camera record of the Fidelio rehearsals is intercut with film of the actual performance to explore how Beethoven’s music transforms the stock characters in the libretto into a profound meditation on loyalty and freedom. Standing in the same place as Beethoven did when he conducted the opera in 1805, Bernstein recreates the problems the composer would have experienced as he became increasingly aware of his deafness during rehearsals —“Maestro, should that be D flat?”

For the Ninth, Bernstein sits at the piano and explains how in the final movement the composer goes beyond the words of the Schiller poem to affirm the brotherhood of man. Then we see the last movement played in its entirety. (The companion disc has the performance of the whole symphony.) In 125 minutes we learn more about the composer’s life and achievement that in the 140 minutes of In Search of Beethoven.

Still, Grabsky’s film provides an excellent general introduction to Beethoven’s life and is a superb guide to some the finest orchestras in Europe.