When talking about playing one of the greatest composers in history, chatting about conducting and movements and whatnot, Ed Harris sounds less like a major movie star and more like he never gave up the baritone horn after 12th grade.
Then again, he may have wanted a date. That smaller member of the tuba family doesn’t exactly have the same coolness factor as, say, an electric guitar.
“It’s not a real social instrument, you know what I mean?” Harris says, laughing. “It’s not like you bring the tuba to a party and play for your friends.”
Currently entrenched in New York and starring in Neil Labute’s new play “Wrecks,” Harris was admittedly more of a Bob Dylan aficionado than an avid listener of Ludwig van Beethoven. That all changed, however, when his director friend Agnieska Holland convinced him to play the larger-than-life German composer in “Copying Beethoven.” The film follows Beethoven in his last years, when a young female composition student, Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger), is sent to be Beethoven’s copyist on the eve of the Viennese premiere of his ninth symphony. In the patriarchal world of 19th-century classical music, Anna is not taken seriously, especially at first by Beethoven, but the girl soon becomes the composer’s closest confidante and supporter.
Harris gained weight and was clad in some makeup to capture the broad nose and facial structures often seen in paintings. Yet more important to the performance was the music itself — Harris filled up an entire iPod with different symphonies and other pieces.
“The one thing I became deeply appreciated about him, other than the brilliance of his music, was the fact he overcame all of this [struggle],” he says. “He wasnot a well guy the last few years of his life. He triumphed over that and he worked till the day he died. His will and his courage were pretty incredible.”
But it was the music itself that told Harris a lot about Beethoven the person, since for him it covers the whole spectrum of human emotion.
“To me, it really makes you acutely aware of how vital he was and how much he really did embrace life, even though he was a bit reclusive and irascible,” Harris, 55, says. “Some people even thought he was losing his mind in his later years, but his music is so moving and so powerful and it can be beautiful, it can be angry and strong — it’s really pretty amazing.
“To me, it said to me that this was a guy that was living life to the fullest.”
Although Harris had a brush with music early in life — and is eyeing a baritone on consignment down the street from where he’s living in New York at the moment — he had never conducted an orchestra before “Copying Beethoven.”
“The first time I actually got the complete score of the ninth symphony, it was unbelievable. Open it up and you just kind of gasp and go, ‘God.’ ” Harris says. “Some of that stuff’s really tricky. Especially in the fourth movement there, conducting-wise there are some very intricate changes that are somewhat challenging. It was just thrilling to shoot it.”
So was it Beethoven who was looking so excited in the cinematic climax of the symphony, or was it Harris?
“When I act, I try to make it an integral thing for myself anyway so it’s kind of hard to separate the two,” he says. “Yeah, Beethoven’s excited, yeah, I’m excited, but hopefully it’s the character that’s conducting.”
Artistry in motion
The last time Ed Harris played a famous artist, it was as Jackson Pollack in his directorial debut, “Pollack.” He’s ready to direct again, with the Western “Appaloosa.” “Pollack was almost a decade of my life. Plus, just the time and whether you’re home or not, you’re preoccupied with this thing for years and I needed to let that kind of obsession die down a little bit. My daughter’s 13 now and I’d been living with Pollack from the time she was born and I didn’t want to get involved with something that would take me away that much.”
