“The ideal would be to play Beethoven as he intended, in other words, ‘badly.’  That’s what I’ve tried to achieve in my film Ludwig van.” Filmed in 1969 and broadcast for the first time in June 1970 as festivities celebrating the bicentenary of Beethoven’s birth were in full swing, Ludwig van puts the audience directly in Beethoven’s shoes: we see what he sees and hear what he hears as he arrives in Bonn and makes his way across his hometown, catching the astonished reactions of passersby and discovering, little by little, the monuments that bear witness to the construction of his own Romantic mythology. A collage of music from the film has been turned into a concert work.