Copying Beethoven, directed by Agnieszka Holland, is a biopic of Ludwig Van Beethoven (played by Ed Harris) that is premised on a fictional Anna Holtz (played by Diane Kruger), though based on actual persons, as his assistant from the completion of the Ninth Symphony until his death. After a prologue in which Anna cries on Beethoven’s deathbed in 1827, the scene shifts to the day in 1824 when she enters Beethoven’s apartment, having been sent by her music conservatory as the best student of music composition. After the shock of finding that she is a twenty-three-year old beauty, Beethoven agrees to let her work. Her job is to make copies of the final draft of the Ninth Symphony for his publisher, which is to premier the composition within less than a week. The movie next develops the principal characters. Anna, whose father was a coal miner in Silesia, was in Vienna to study musical composition; she lives with an aunt at a nunnery and has a handsome boyfriend, Martin Bauer (played by Matthew Goode). Beethoven is portrayed as a genius who is allowed eccentricities and bullies everyone, that is, until Anna informs him that she has “corrected” a note in the Fourth Movement because it needed to be more Beethovian. He likes her independent spirit, so they get on famously, though she has a hidden agenda—to show him some of her own compositions after the premiere. Since Beethoven is mostly deaf, he is not able to conduct properly, so she ends up giving him cues from the orchestra pit, and his symphony is a great success. Afterward, she reveals her own music, which Beethoven first ridicules and then says that it has promise to keep her working with him, especially his last string quartets, and she drops her boyfriend, a budding architect that Beethoven exposes to have little imagination, in order to stay alongside the genius. Several themes emerge in the film, which will delight anyone who enjoys hearing the music of Beethoven. One is of course the concept of the genius, whom society allows to be different so that the extraordinary talent can produce masterpieces, a genre that includes A Beautiful Mind (2001) and many other movies. A second is the theory of music attributed to Beethoven—that music comes from God and is a way of praising God. Beethoven’s God is indeed powerful, captured with magnificent chords punctuated by crashing cymbals and thunderous drums, and one criticism of the film is that filmviewers expect more of Beethoven’s music than they hear. His explanation of the theory behind the last string quartets, that some themes depict death and others new life, also needs more playing of the compositions. A third theme is the role of women as helpmates to geniuses, recalling the two films about the composer Mahler–Mahler (1974) and Bride of the Wind (2001). The idea for the story, however, appears to come from the experience of the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, who employed a female assistant, then wrote some of his best novels, and eventually married her–that would indeed be a fascinating biopic. MH