In Beethoven’s Nine, Canadian documentarian becomes a storyline after a devastating loss

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Canadian documentarian Larry Weinstein was well into the making of his latest work, Beethoven’s Nine: Ode to Humanity, when his cinematographer suggested that he appear in the film. Having never been on screen in any of his 40 works, he initially dismissed the idea. But an unexpected personal loss ultimately became one of the central storylines in the film, which premiered April 28 at the Hot Docs Festival in Toronto.

“I was traumatized, and I wanted to be guided by what Beethoven created,” Weinstein said.

Beethoven’s Nine is an examination of today’s world from the humanist ideals of the Enlightenment era that fuelled Beethoven to write his 1824 choral symphony masterwork Symphony No. 9 in pain and in total deafness, as a love letter to humanity and a protest letter in response to the world that was crumbling around the composer.

Weinstein featured eight characters in the film, including Canadian-Ukrainian conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, author-philosopher Steven Pinker, famed conductor Leonard Bernstein and four others. Weinstein reluctantly became the ninth subject of the documentary after a tragedy struck while the film was in production.

Hamas militants shot Weinstein’s sister Judih and her husband on Oct. 7 near the kibbutz in Israel where they lived. The documentary’s producers (Toronto’s Riddle Films and Berlin-based 3B-Produktion) were supportive if Weinstein needed to step away from the project, but he felt the opposite.

“I wanted desperately to keep working,” Weinstein said after a Hot Docs screening and an emotional Q&A session. (The film’s final screening is Saturday afternoon, at Scotiabank Theatre.)

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The German composer was inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s poem Ode to Joy and a school of progressive philosophers to create his final completed symphony.

“All the cool kids were Enlightenment thinkers,” writer Rebecca Newberger Goldstein says in the documentary. “Beethoven would have been aware of what was flyin.’ ”

In the four epic, hopeful movements of Symphony No. 9, Beethoven expressed the struggle, elegance and ultimate ascendancy of humanity. In Beethoven’s Nine, which is an allusion to the film Ocean’s Eleven, a Peanuts comic strip is shown: “I’m looking for the answer to life, Schroeder,” Lucy says. “What do you think is the answer?” To which the piano-playing Schroeder replies, “Beethoven!”

Weinstein’s 2017 documentary Beethoven’s Hair investigated the severe discomfort the maestro endured in his later years, when he suffered from kidney stones, hepatitis and gastrointestinal infections, as well as buzzing and sharp pains in his failing ears.

While writing his symphony, Beethoven may also have been suffering from the politics of the era. “Politicians were sociopathic and autocratic and religion was terribly conservative, somewhat like what we’re experiencing now,” Weinstein said. “He’s deaf, in chronic pain and he’s misanthropic. Yet, he loves humankind.”

Weinstein was initially “dead set” against appearing in the film himself. “I don’t even like my voice asking questions off camera,” he said. “I don’t want to break that fourth wall.”

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As it turned out, he didn’t just break the fourth wall. He obliterated it to the soundtrack of an ecstatic classical music masterpiece.

His long-time friend and cinematographer John Minh Tran coaxed him into it and casually filmed the director receiving a haircut to get him comfortable in front of the camera.

“That was funny, because I’m a filmmaker,” Weinstein said. “I know all the manipulation techniques.”

It worked. At one point in the film, we see him speaking with Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mélanie Joly, about the status of his sister and brother-in-law, who were then thought to be missing. Eventually, it was determined that they had been killed.

Before Beethoven’s Nine, the prolific documentarian, who specializes in music docs (including Ravel’s Brain, The Devil’s Horn and the Oscar-nominated short Making Overtures), had not made a film in four years. Approached about another Beethoven film, he initially rejected the proposal out of hand. But he later came up with the idea of connecting Symphony No. 9 with the Russia-Ukraine War and a concert by the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which is made up of Ukrainian refugee musicians. It was a complex proposal with a tight window of time. But orchestra conductor Wilson was enthusiastic and the film’s producers okayed the concept.

“My bluff was called,” Weinstein said with a laugh. “Suddenly the film became a reality.”

The orchestra’s Warsaw performance of the symphony, with the choral parts performed in Ukrainian, was captured in the film. The documentary also covers Bernstein’s historic conducting of the symphony in Berlin on Christmas Day in 1989, just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Many symphonies will mark the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s opus. On Saturday, conductor Judith Yan is set to lead the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra, soloists and a mass choir at Sid Buckwold Theatre.

Weinstein’s postscreening discussions at Hot Docs have been emotional.

“I found myself holding back tears, sometimes not successfully,” he said. “It’s cathartic and it’s incredible therapy, not that I’m saying I’m fixed. But there is a beauty in grieving, and I feel like this has been a celebration in a way.”