Eroica (2003 film)

Eroica is a BBC television film that dramatised the first performance of Beethoven’s third symphony, the Eroica. It carried the tagline ‘The day that changed music forever’. The film was directed by Simon Cellan Jones and was written by Nick Dear. Ian Hart starred as the composer, with Tim Pigott-Smith, Anton Lesser, and Frank Finlay along with Jack Davenport and Claire Skinner leading the cast. The music was played by Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique conducted by Sir John Eliot Gardiner. It won the Prix Italia for Performing Arts in 2004. Plot The film is set in Vienna on 9 June 1804, the date of the private, first performance of Beethoven’s third symphony, later to be known as the ‘Eroica’. The performance, and most of the action in the film, takes place at the palace of one of Beethoven’s patrons, Prince Franz Lobkowitz. Midway during the performance, Beethoven tries to persuade his lover, a widow named Josephine von Deym, to marry him, but she refuses because of the unfair laws regarding child custody — she is a member of the nobility, and cannot marry a commoner without losing custody of her children. Later, composer Joseph Haydn, now old and feeble, arrives just in tim