The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Beethoven's Love Letter to Humanity

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

What is the greatest piece of music ever written? If you said Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you'll get no argument here. But how to describe a documentary about the Ninth which includes Russia's immoral war against Ukraine, Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel a year ago, and the cartoonist who created Charlie Brown? Complicated? You bet. Here are the director, writer, and narrator Larry Weinstein; and one of the producers Liam Romalis.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And discover your 2-Point TVO. What is the greatest piece of music ever written? Well, if you said Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, you'll get no argument here. But how to describe a documentary about the Ninth, which includes Russia's immoral war against Ukraine, Hamas' terrorist attack on Israel a year ago, and the cartoonist who created Charlie Brown. Complicated? You bet. So here are the director, writer, and narrator,

Larry Weinstein, and one of the producers, Liam Romales, to talk about Beethoven's Nine, Ode to Humanity, which I have to say is a sensational documentary. I've seen it twice already, and I'm going to see it again. So first of all, welcome you two. Thank you. Thank you. And let's play a little clip from the documentary

so we can tell everybody what this thing's about. Sheldon, if you would, roll it. This is a film in which we set out to feature nine subjects who somehow embodied Beethoven, his Ninth Symphony, and the ideals that inspired him. What resulted is not the film that I had expected to make. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"]

Tell us more. What kind of movie did you set out to make? We had been commissioned primarily by Arte, the cultural station in Germany, to make a film to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the premiere of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. And so we were thinking about different aspects of that. In truth, I wasn't sure I even wanted to do it

because I had already made a film about Beethoven. But then we were thinking, what if we talk about the ideals of the Enlightenment that inspired Beethoven? Why don't we come up with some ideas of people who kind of overlap with those ideals? And what if we approach the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, made up of refugees from Ukraine that formed just after that war broke out, that terrible war, and founded by and conducted by Carrie Lynn Wilson, who is from Winnipeg, but who has a Ukrainian family. What if we, and it was built on the ideals of humanism and of freedom and peace, which is what inspired Beethoven. So what if we try to combine all these ingredients, as well as find other people?

And essentially, nine people and how the ninth affected them. Yes, it's sort of like Ocean's Eleven. It's not called Beethoven's Ninth. It's called Beethoven's Nine. Exactly. That's not called Beethoven's Ninth, it's called Beethoven's Nine. Exactly. That's not quite what happened. Well, that isn't quite what happened, but I do want to say that when Larry approached me and my partner Jason about this film, it was, he said, I'm really not sure I want to

make this film, and we have basically less than a year. So we had for a feature-length documentary that's an incredibly short amount of time. So the the challenge of course is you know you have to move very quickly all of the pieces have to fall into place you have to start reaching out to people and it was very clear that we didn't want to do a traditional music doc because there's no sense in that there have been countless docs made about Beethoven's ninth analyzing each movement we wanted to do something that was about the here and now something that although this is a piece that's 200

years old it's unbelievable that we're still listening to it and it's still as ubiquitous as ever, that we really wanted to comment about the world we live in today. And it was the first major symphony in which people sang and what is, there are so many extraordinary moments in your film, Larry, but none more so than when Beethoven's Ninth, the Ode to Joy,

is sung in Ukrainian. Not in the original German, but in Ukrainian. And they changed some of the words. Tell me about that. Yeah, Carolyn thought she was inspired by the fact that when Schiller first wrote the poem, which inspired Beethoven when he was 15 years old, and Beethoven always knew that he wanted to set it to music,

but didn't until the end of his life. But it was Ode to Joy that he had written. And then Leonard Bernstein performed it in 1989 with the Berlin Wall coming down and he changed it to Ode to Freedom, which is apparently what Schiller first wanted to call it. And that inspired Carolyn to go ode to glory. Ode to glory. Glory, because slava.

Slava is sort of the thing that they talk about all the time. Slava Ukraine. Yes. Yeah. So she wanted, and then it occurred to her, OK, I've got, because she got all these forces together. I had approached her to do this piece of music and I was sure they would say no

because you don't just get a full orchestra, a full choir and soloist together in this little amount of time we had, but she decided to do this in Poland and was given a Polish choir. And so two weeks or three weeks before the performance, she thought, let's do it in Ukrainian. It will have so much more meaning.

But the poor Polish choir had to learn Ukrainian. Which they did brilliantly. And here we got a statement here from Carolyn Wilson, Sheldon, let's bring this up. She writes, as Ukraine continues its fight on behalf of the free world, it needs our support more than ever and we will proudly take our message across Europe

and the United States in an expression of love for Ukraine and our steadfastness in our resistance to tyranny. They are, this is like an all-star band, right, Liam? They've just sort of brought the band together and they are, they are out there making their music and making their message, aren't they? They are what really made this film, I think, possible. When you reach out to Carrie Lynn Wilson and she said, and you fully expected her this film, I think, possible. When you reach out to Carrie Lynn Wilson, and she said, and you fully expected her to say, forget it. No, there's no way we're going to perform the ninth.

We can't pull it off. When she said, no, we'd love to do the ninth, and we'd love to do it in Warsaw with the Polish National Opera, it really, like it felt like the film had the momentum out of the blocks that it needed. One of the other nine you feature is a guy named Steven Pinker, whom Canadians will know

because he's one of us, and now of course a Harvard professor, author of Enlightenment Now. And as you were including him in the documentary, I wonder if you had a moment where you thought his book is about enlightenment now and he's suggesting that now is the best time in human history to be born in. Yes.

But we feel like a million miles away from enlightenment right now, don't we? Yeah, it's really hard to reconcile this, that we live in the best of all possible worlds, the best of all possible times, which is kind of the thesis of his book. And he has very convincing evidence that it is and that these other things that are terrible are kind of blips.

And that in the trends of the world, you know that we have more education, we have more wealth, we have actually more compassion. In many ways, the environment crisis is something that we actually deal with unlike the past. In many ways and the birth rates and and and all these things are much much better than they have ever been and yet yes. Here we are. It feels like things are oblique. I gotta confess I've never heard of Monica Brodka. Then again I'm not quite her target demographic. She's the Beethoven of Polish rock, you tell us, 36 years old and a real,

I mean that's not even alternative rock. What would you call what she does? Well, I mean she is a bona fide Polish pop star. She's a rock star, pop star. Punk star. She, she, punk star. She commands audiences of thousands and thousands of people. Has she heard of Beethoven's Ninth before this?

She has, however, I think that the role of Monica Bracca, or Bracca as she likes to be known, was to sort of experience the Ninth through her eyes. She was the person perhaps least familiar with the Ninth, and that's why when there's a wonderful scene when she comes to the concert hall where the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra and Carolyn Wilson are rehearsing, we were really getting a sense of her,

of this monumental symphony washing over her. In some ways for the first time. Of course, she talks about the Ode to Joy. She says, you know, that's the, if you stop 10 people on the street, nine of them will certainly know the Ode to Joy. Yeah. But there's another reason why I think we were attracted to her. We found out in the process of, like, I have to admit,

I don't love the melody of the Ode to Joy. It seems really banal. What? No. To run that off on TV. We found out in the process of, like, I have to admit, I don't love the melody of the Ode to Joy. It seems really banal. What? No. That's what Michael was saying. On TV, you have to. That is this moment of heresy brought to you

by Larry Weinstein. OK. Well, I think first year piano students when they're little kids all play Ode to Joy. I remember playing on the piano Ode to Joy and then quitting piano. And you know, it's just a really common thing. But, but I was talking to a musicologist,

a Beethoven musicologist, and they said, don't you realize what he was doing? He was trying to create a folk song, something that sounded like it was hundreds of years old, primal, that anyone can sing. Accessible. Accessible. Accessible. And then when we found out that Bratka,

that Monika Bratka, had grown up in the Polish mountains as a folk musician, and her father intended her to be part of that tradition, and she can't shake that folk thing, it's like when she heard the Ode to Joy, she got it. She got it. And not to mention that she's in Poland, which is right next to Ukraine. Indeed.

I mean, right next to Russia. To Russia, yeah. I want to circle back to something you said earlier in our conversation as it relates to Leonard Bernstein and his conducting of Beethoven's Ninth as the Berlin Wall was coming down Christmas 1989. We have younger people watching us right now who will have no first-hand memory of this. So put them in that time.

What was the significance of that concert at that moment? Well, you know, this was at the end of the horrible Cold War. It was a leftover from World War II when communists and the Capitalists and the different country were fighting and and Germany had been divided to East and West Germany Berlin was East and West Berlin and there was this wall that was erected in 1961 It was a traumatic thing and divided families and divided friends and it was and it was just a very awful political act. And then in 89, that wall came down and it represented the unifying and a better world.

Maybe we're now looking forward. And Bernstein was so moved by that, that he said, I want to conduct Beethoven's 9th Symphony in Berlin. I'm going to do it in East Berlin and West Berlin. And it was a very meaningful thing. And he knew he only had a few months to live. But he was determined to use every ounce of strength that he could. Here's how you captured it in Beethoven's 9.

Sheldon, if you would. My parents asked me whether we want to go to the wall and to chop some pieces out. So I took my ski goggles, which I bought a couple of years ago in Czechoslovakia, and we went to the wall and start chopping pieces out of the wall, as we did a couple of days before. And suddenly there was a lady staying next to us

and saying, look, there's a guy coming that looks like Leonhard Bernstein. And Bernstein was coming and said, I am Leonhard Bernstein. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] And there's Franz as a little guy. How did you find him? How did you find the guy in that picture?

Well, I, you know, it's a great story. And I said, I don't want to have this in the film unless we find France. But because it is the 200th anniversary of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, the Beethoven Museum in Bonn, Germany, the birthplace of Beethoven, they had kind of been in contact with him and they were going to display the hammer and chisel that Bernstein used in a big glass case. So through them we found him. But I was warned he's never been interviewed.

He's going to be very shy. He doesn't want to talk. And he was effusive. He was. Yeah, it was really amazing. He was a delightful surprise. And in a full circle moment, Beethoven's Nine premiered at Beethoven House in Bonn

alongside the Hammer and Chisel this past May. So it really felt like, you know, very organic. And Franz was there with his father who brought him to the wall and I was just staring. It's like, oh, not look at the film, I want to watch them. And they were glowing. And the other person who was there was the daughter of Leonard Bernstein, Jamie Bernstein,

who was just so moved and so, yeah, it was nice. Larry, I have to make a very hard turn here because we're gonna talk about something that was very unanticipated when you started to make your movie. And that came right home to you. Your sister, your brother-in-law, were in Israel on October 7th of last year.

And they lived in a kibbutz near Gaza. And they were directly involved, let's put it that way, in all of the events of that day. How and why did you decide to put all that in your movie? I didn't decide to do that. I have made a lot of films in my life. I had never been in one of my films. I never narrated a film except for one other film.

That's a TV Ontario film on propaganda. But I just, at one point, because I'd been filming the Ukrainian orchestra members talking to them about war and trauma, the cameraman that I've worked with for many years, John Min Tran, was walking up to me and he said, Larry, I have this idea and you're gonna hate it. I need to turn the camera on you.

And I'm getting emotional. And I'm going to call Liam and Jason at Riddle Films and your German producers at 3B and find out, get them to submit questions to you. And tomorrow morning, we're going to do an interview. And you're going to be on the film, and you're going to talk about it. And I thought, oh, I don't want to do this. I don't want to.

I was in such denial. Let's just keep making the film that we were going to make. That's what I was referring to at the beginning. And so finally I said, yeah, I have to, I have to. You did, you made the right decision. Yes, yes. So he ended up following me and then he said, right after we finished the interview,

it was such a sigh of relief and he said, what are doing now and I said I'm going to go and visit my mother I need to be with her and he said I'm going to follow you so he just kept following us following me and then my daughter and yes she was in it too. Now there's a moment in the movie obviously after the 7th of October your sister and her husband go missing and you don't know where they are. And you end up getting Melanie Jolie, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, on the phone. And she's assuring you that what she's about to tell you ought to be off the record and not for publication. Right, she did say that.

She did. And you guys are rolling on it and it's in the movie. Did you get any satisfaction out of that phone call with her? It wasn't just the phone call. Well, she told us some information we didn't know. We didn't know that all the hostages weren't in one place. They were in different places. And were not all taken by the same group.

Yeah. I subsequently, my daughter Allie and I were in Ottawa and had meetings with her and she was really very sympathetic but also she assured us of what Canada was trying to do at the, in Qatar and anyway we really felt, yeah, we felt better having spoken with her but we knew it was hopeless. We knew information right away that looked bad, but I think we were kind of admonished. I had to deal with Israeli IDF and intelligence, and I felt almost admonished as many of us in my family for losing hope. And hope can be difficult if you think that it's hopeless.

Let me do one more follow up on this. Your daughter wanted Minister Jolie to denounce Israel. Your daughter wanted the minister to publicly, your Jewish daughter, I should add, wanted the minister to denounce Israel. Have you had any blowback from the Jewish community on that? Surprisingly little. I had said something similar

being interviewed by this station called the CBC. I've heard of it. I was accused of being a self-hating Jew and it's like no, I don't hate myself. I hate people like Netanyahu. So no, there was some blowback originally. And some of the people who were resistant have come to me and said, you know what? I believe what Ali was saying back then. I think that she was right.

The thing is, that was only three weeks after October 7 that she said those things. And yeah, that was only three weeks after October 7 that she said those things. And yeah, it was very strong of her. And Allie was very, very emotional. And in a weird way, afterwards, Leonard Bernstein kind of answers her well about having to be humane, having to be, anyway, yeah. Gotcha.

It's very emotional, obviously, to talk about. And it involved a lot of people. Indeed. Gotcha. It's very emotional, obviously, to talk about. And it involved a lot of people. Indeed. Yeah. Liam, I wonder if having, after having made this picture, at some point, I presume you asked yourself, how in heaven's name did Beethoven compose this potentially most beautiful piece of music

ever composed in world history, and he was completely deaf at the time. How did he do it? Did you come to any conclusions on that? You know, it's a great question. I have very few conclusions and just more admiration, I think, than anything else. The fact is that Beethoven, and we touch on this in the film, Beethoven was getting very near the end of his life. He was completely deaf.

He was in pain. He was suffering. He had withdrawn from society. And the fact that he could find it in himself to create, to compose this work of art that is a plea for connectedness, for unity, for breaking down barriers between people. It's just an extraordinary feat, and it's one that I think that we really try and explore

through all of the different characters and subjects in this film. I mean, this film, I believe, is, it truly is, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Do you ever come to a conclusion about that? How does a guy who can't hear a thing create something so gorgeous? You know, I sometimes think about his deafness, and people will talk about it's like the greatest tragedy of classical music and classical composers. And I think, well, you know, except the musicians were very limited back then.

And in a way, in a way, did his deafness help him write music that was unfettered? The fact that he was completely deaf and that he could just write beautiful things. And he was insecure about it. He was insecure about the use of words, like I said. But at the end, he accepted it. And I was just reading a quote of his today, where he basically said, I can now die. I've done this work.

I'm ready to end. But I'm glad he didn't, because he wrote a lot of great string quartets afterwards. In our last few minutes here, let's touch on this. The message of the ninth, the ultimate message, Allah mentioned Werden Brüder, all men will be brothers someday. Having made the movie, Liam, start us off.

How does that prognostication hit you now? It feels in the time we're living in that it's something that is pretty out of reach in many ways. However, I believe that this is something that we have to strive for continually. And all of us and all of the characters in our film, in their own way, are fighting against the pessimism, fighting against the darkness. Foremost among the stories is Larry, who despite the awful tragic circumstances

that are documented in the film, you find a way to reach towards the light out of the darkness. Did you, Larry? I can't stand the dehumanization of people and the dehumanization of both sides. And for instance, the Israel Hamas thing, same in Ukraine and Russia.

I believe in humanity. I feel like Beethoven's belief was inspirational to me. Beethoven wanted to set this beautiful poem. He waited till the end when he was deaf and he was in pain. And not just that, society had closed down. The aristocracy was increasingly rich, and there was more divide. The politicians were increasingly sociopathic

and narcissistic in his own life, and also religion. There was the, you know, the restoration was becoming, it was becoming more closed and more, it was all anti-enlightenment. And he wanted to write a love letter to humanity and I think he wanted to write a love letter to us, to the future, like this is what we have to strive for in the face of darkness and I think that we have to learn from that.

I want everybody to see this movie. And so I'm gonna just spend a minute here telling people how they can do that. Because it was on, I think we played it on TVO last night in prime time, it's on YouTube. So look for Beethoven's Nine on YouTube, you'll find it there. And then there is a special screening

at the Royal Conservatory of Music's Kerner Hall, downtown Toronto, on the 19th of November. November 19. I think I'm emceeing that. Yeah, they're gonna have a special screening. Gustavo Gimeno from the TSO is gonna be there. And they're gonna play some music afterwards. And it's gonna be a night.

It's gonna be a night. It's going to be a night. Is this your best movie? I think this is your best movie. I've seen almost all your movies. I think this is your best one. You know what's funny? Towards the end of the film, Sarah Pauley saw it, and she said, this is the film that you're going to be remembered for.

And I went, what about the other 40 films? Are they Chopped Liver? They're not Chopped Liver, but this is the best. My opinion, for what it's worth. Will they say your last film is, you know, whatever they say? Only as good as your last film. Well, if you're only as good as your last film, then you're pretty darn good.

This was great. Thank you. Liam Ramales, founder, Riddle Films, producer of Beethoven's Nine, Ode to Humanity, Larry Weinstein, Canadian, Documentarian, Director, Writer, Narrator, Beethoven's Nine, Ode to Humanity. Don't walk to see it, run to see it, run to see it. Thanks guys.

Thank you. Thank you.