Immortal Beloved (1994)

Note that this is basically the same "post-mortem investigation into a central mystery in the life of a Great Man" from Citizen Kane (1941).

Immortal Beloved turns mainstream scoring practice and its theory on its head in two ways. First, music is used, in a very audible way, to undermine image; and second, it inverts the aural hierarchy of voice over music. This is possible, I suggest, precisely because the music used is Beethoven’s.

[…]

[The] varied and often inaccurate interpretation of Beethoven's life has created a character detached from its historical anchorage. Subjected to misinterpretation and fabrication from the outset, the composer’s biography has received a posthumous reception even more elaborate, a process that has buried ‘real’ events beneath two hundred years of mythologising. Beethoven has become less a historical figure than a mass-cultural idea, a myth subject to constant revision in tune with society’s evolving trends. [Yet] filmic biographies of Beethoven offer an audio-visual manifestation of the myth, with cinema’s ability to access and disseminate ideas prevalent in a culture making it a unique forum in which to gauge public perceptions of the composer today. In other words, cinema can tell us not how it was, but, rather, how it is.

[…]

Providing the raw material of the film, Beethoven’s music calls upon the ideological amalgam surrounding the composer to complete the picture. The potential range of meaning offered by the music is regulated by the viewer’s prior knowledge of the composer, the conditioned reflexes that the idea of him conjures up. Audience interpretation is, in other words, channelled into a culturally-determined reading by the music. […] Narrative in the film, then, is constructed (or rather completed) by the audience. Filling in the gaps with knowledge external to the film, the viewer realises the myth through an act of self-narration.

[…]

As the camera continues to pull back at an increasing speed, the lake disappears and Beethoven becomes a star in the Milky Way. In a scene of unabashed Hollywood excess, Beethoven is taken from his own body by the music in an explicit illustration of mythologisation: as image, Beethoven becomes insignificant, indistinguishable; as music, he becomes the universal in a very literal sense.

[…]

Using music as its springboard, […] Immortal Beloved creates a character dislocated from his own reality, an imaginary projection narcissistically rooted in the present. [He] becomes the product of discourse, a malleable, workable idea far removed from the solidity of unrepeatable historical ‘reality’.

— Holly Rogers (British Postgraduate Musicology)