The day that changed music forever...

By the time the first public performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No.3 (Eroica) took place in Vienna in 1805, a privileged few had already heard the work at a private play-through at the Lobkowitz Palace in June 1804. Nick Dear’s award-winning period drama, starring Ian Hart as Beethoven, brings to life the momentous day that prompted Haydn to remark ‘everything is different from today’. Filmed in 2003.

Ian Hart, Tim Pigott-Smith, Claire Skinner, Jack Davenport, Frank Finlay, Fenella Woolgar, Lucy Akhurst, Leo Bill, Peter Hanson, Robert Glenister, Anton Lesser.
Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique / Sir John Eliot Gardiner

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Reviews

‘Ian Hart is brilliant as Beethoven, a volatile,magnetic figure of genius and uncouth charm.…not to be missed.’
Daily Mail

'You could not hope for a stronger cast’
The Times

‘A clever and beautifully made dramatisation’
Sunday Times

‘This was thrilling stuff, as exciting visually as it was aurally’
Sunday Telegraph

‘It’s a long time since I heard a modern performance of the Eroica shorn of its first-movement exposition repeat, but the old ways can still be made to work. Gardiner’s first movement has a bare and remorseless intensity that Jordi Savall’s rabble rousing Naïve recording aims at but never hits…Gardiner springs his surprise with the finale. A tempo that seems at first tepid grows around the music, allowing the fugue its due weight, the flute solo its pathos and the horns their full measure of glory. … The enterprise is probably a one-off but it’s tempting to imagine what this team could do with the Fifth, or even the Ninth.’
The Gramophone

‘The composition of Beethoven's Third Symphony ("Eroica"), its dedication to Napoleon and Beethoven's angry withdrawal of that dedication add up to one of the most dramatic and stylistically significant events in music history. On this disc, the story is told in a vivid, superbly acted and directed BBC dramatization that includes a complete performance of the symphony.’
Washington Post

'Eroica' DVD is compelling …scripted by Nick Dear, Beethoven rehearses the "Eroica" before the Lobkowitzes and their household servants, several of their aristocratic friends - among them, a recently widowed countess the composer hopes to marry - and (a late arrival) Joseph Haydn, the revered elder composer who had been Beethoven's teacher. 
A dramatization of a rehearsal may not promise to sustain viewer interest for an hour and 20 minutes, but this was not just any rehearsal. 
Beethoven's new symphony blew away settled precedents and expectations of music and challenged the stamina and comprehension of both performers and listeners. It cast "the artist as hero," Haydn said. "After this, everything changes." 
To relive a moment of radical change in real time, to see the change registering in the facial expressions and gestures of witnesses, is dramatically compelling. 
On this level of storytelling, Dear and director Simon Cellan Jones are greatly assisted by a cast of English actors who have mastered the art of self-contained emoting and the small but significant gesture.
Humanizing and domesticating a revolutionary moment in cultural history is an extraordinarily difficult trick to pull off. (An even tougher trick is to credibly portray this famously forbidding cultural icon being addressed familiarly as "Louie.")
Dear, Jones and this cast pull it off with great subtlety and yet with great effect. The film's emotional impact jolts the viewer in much the same way that the music jolted its first hearers.'
Richmond Times-Dispatch