We step into the score of Lord Curzon Ki Haveli, where first-time director Anshuman Jha and Belgian composer Simon Fransquet discuss how they rescored Beethoven’s iconic pieces
Anshuman Jha and Simon Fransquet
Beethoven doesn’t usually walk into a black comedy set inside a haveli. But in 2025, he does. Also, he doesn’t sound like you remember him. In actor-turned-director Anshuman Jha’s debut feature Lord Curzon Ki Haveli, the German composer’s timeless motifs are torn apart, stretched, distorted, and reborn. It’s a bold decision Jha has taken to take the most sacred pages of Western classical music and set them against a biting satire with irony, menace, and absurdity. To make this happen, Jha tapped Belgian composer Simon Fransquet, whose approach to sound design matched the director’s instinct for contrasts. Together, they set out not just to “use” Beethoven but to ask — what would he sound like in 2025?
For Jha, the idea goes back to his own encounters with Beethoven. When we sit across from him for a conversation, Jha tells me, “I was exposed to Beethoven records in my childhood and also when I learnt to play the keyboard. His pieces are timeless and haunting in a way which aligns with the genre of our film. I was reintroduced to them inside lifts in Mumbai. As a debutant film maker, I wanted to play with contrasts. And sound design is a critical element to the cinema viewing experience; less is more when it comes to music. Beethoven is precise, almost sacred — and setting that against the chaos of a black comedy like Lord Curzon Ki Haveli, set in the West, creates a tension that feels both absurd and profound. In 2025, these classical pieces aren’t just background music, they’re ironic narrators, amplifying the madness inside the haveli while reminding us that human folly, like great art, is eternal.”
Jha tapped Belgian composer Simon Fransquet and set out not just to ‘use’ Beethoven but to ask — what would the master sound like in 2025?
For Jha, this wasn’t a decorative choice. Beethoven was written into the DNA of the film before a single frame was shot. “I didn’t want to borrow from Beethoven — I wanted a collaboration across centuries,” he says. “Even before I got Simon on board for Lord Curzon — on the writing table itself, I was clear to have the Beethoven pieces as thematic elements. When I told Simon this he was stoked, which is what I love about him. For Simon and me, the key was respect. We weren’t interested in just ‘using’ Beethoven as a backdrop; we wanted to be in dialogue with him. The idea was to strip the compositions down to their emotional DNA and then re-stage them in ways that would feel alive, ironic, sometimes unsettling for today’s audience. We asked: what does Beethoven’s intensity mean inside a darkly comic thriller in 2025? The challenge was to reimagine the texture without losing the truth of the notes. I went to Belgium, and we hired live musicians and recorded. The timbre was the challenge but once we set the mood vis-a-vis the sound design of the film, we flew.”
Much of the magic unfolded in Belgium, Fransquet tells us. For him, the challenge was philosophical. “For me it’s about resonance, not imitation. Beethoven is one of the most instantly recognisable voices in music history, so in 2025 the challenge is: how does his DNA echo inside today’s soundscape? I didn’t think in terms of a museum reproduction but of texture, tension, distortion. The violin we recorded doesn’t play Für Elise as you know it — it scratches at it and then screams it. It becomes almost ghostly, as if Beethoven is still present but filtered through today’s fractured emotional world.”
The hardest part of the project wasn’t the technical reinvention, but the tonal balance between pathos and parody. “That was the most delicate part. If you lean too far into the pathos, it becomes melodrama; too far into irony, it becomes parody. The trick was to let the music wobble on that line — sometimes sincere, sometimes grotesque. It mirrors the ambiguity of the film itself: the absurdity and the violence living side by side,” Fransquet explains.
Both Jha and Fransquet are united by the belief that Beethoven, were he alive today, would have embraced their radical approach. “I think he’d be fearless with technology. He was a radical, always breaking rules. He would still be asking: how can music disturb, uplift, and change the way we see the world? That’s timeless,” says Fransquet. We tell them the decision to make Beethoven an ironic narrator feels like a dare to the audience. And in the haunted violins and fractured cadences of Für Elise, in the retextured thunder of the Fifth Symphony, Beethoven’s ghost lingers.
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