‘Painting with money’ is how Michael Winner described making films. And if the money runs out you can always turn your script into a novel. Ken Russell’s Beethoven Confidential was to have starred Anthony Hopkins in the title role with Glenda Jackson and Jodie Foster as a couple of swooning aristos eager to sponsor the fuming maestro. Quite how that Oscar-encrusted team ran out of backers is a mystery Russell doesn’t address. And his prose still bears the traces of its celluloid origins:
Chapter Two. Moonlight filtering through elegant windows hints at surroundings of great luxury. In silhouette, a pretty teenager is seated at the piano playing music that seems to be a manifestation of the atmosphere itself.
The effect is the opposite of a film. Instead of intimacy and fluency there’s a stilted fussiness as Russell gets all the details of his shot just right. This isn’t his fault. He’s a film-director rather than a novelist, but reading his fiction is like watching a film being made, not like watching a film. Luckily the wonky technique is a distraction one soon learns to ignore and Russell’s Beethoven comes across as a perpetually skint curmudgeon who wears the same overcoat for 30 years, counts every last bean that goes into his coffee pot and is so paranoid about dishonest promoters that he sells tickets from a makeshift box-office in his parlour. His life is eased by a coterie of artistic noblewomen who cosset him and call him ‘Luigi’ but whose chastity drives him to brothels where, it is hinted, he picked up the syphilis that caused his deafness. Russell’s investigative method is charmingly random and he prizes humorous controversy over verifiable truths. Were the opening chords of the Fifth Symphony prompted by a summons from fate? No, says Beethoven, it was the rent-collector at the door.
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