Beethoven. Chord of the World

Hero, revolutionary, national idol: in the past, Ludwig van Beethoven had to serve idealistic notions that had nothing to do with his music. On the composer’s 250th birthday, Matthias Henke’s biography shines a light on a person who didn’t made things easy for anyone – particularly not for himself. But his music still touches us today as if he were our contemporary.
It is music from a period in history when the world changed radically; music that liberated itself from the constraints of classical music and found new forms of expression. Matthias Henke portrays Beethoven between Bonn and Vienna caught up in these tensions, but also explains how his music was used for political purposes and how it would even become the epitome of “classical music”: an updated biography for our times.