Recently the Washington Times asked all the Republican candidates about their favorite movies (Newt Gingrich said Casablanca and Herman Cain said The Godfather, and so on), Rick Perry said Immortal Beloved.
It was such a strange answer (though not as strange as Perry's speech in New Hampshire), the Washington Times wrote:
The most unusual choice belongs to Rick Perry, who immediately singled out “Immortal Beloved” as his favorite, adding, “Bet you’ll have to look that one up.” (He was right.) “Immortal Beloved” is a 1994 drama starring Gary Oldman as Ludwig van Beethoven.There's a bit more to this bio-pic than that. The "Immortal Beloved" of the title is a woman to who Beethoven wrote (but did not send) a love letter. It was found among his effects after he died in 1827. For more than a century and a half, real musicologists have struggled to figure out who she was.
The producer of the movie (not a musicologist) believes he settled the issue. He thinks it was Beethoven's sister-in-law. It's a claim no actual scholar has actually proposed.
As Beethoven scholar Lewis Lockwood pointed out:
That this 1994 film by Bernard Rose failed notably as cinematic product is obvious from reviews by film critics, surely none of them musicologists. That it also fails, on other levels, as history and biography is clear enough to music lovers, musicians, musicologists and certainly Beethoven scholar by all of whom it's been pretty much condemned to oblivion.Don't get me wrong, Gary Oldman did a great job and the music, well, was Beethoven.
But it's hardly surprising that such an anti-science guy such as Rick Perry would also be an anti-history guy as well.
Ok, this blog post was a just teensy bit nit picky. But it's MONDAY, for gosh sakes! And it's RAINING, for gosh sakes!
Do I need to go all Carpenters on you?
