Brahms and the Little Singing Girls

This is Palmer’s highly controversial portrait of Brahms – a film that exploded the familiar image of ‘stodgy old bearded Brahms’ – a man whose first musical experience had been playing an upright piano in the brothels of Hamburg where he had grown up, and who at the end of his life lived a bachelor in Vienna having his every need satisfied by the prostitutes of the city whom he always affectionately described as his ‘little singing girls’. It is a celebration – of Brahms’ unabashed, life-enhancing, sexually explosive music. Warren Mitchell portrays the composer