Ah, Brahms!

After a family moves into the Heelshire Mansion, their young son soon makes friends with a life-like doll called Brahms.

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

Semyon Bychkov WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln SYMPHONY NO. 3 IN F MAJOR, OP. 90 SYMPHONY NO. 4 IN E MINOR, OP. 98 Far from being conservative, as Brahms often has been referred to, his symphonies show the composer as a groundbreaking pioneer far ahead of his time. He may not have broken dramatic new ground in the same way as his musical colleagues Liszt and Wagner, who invented new genres. Instead, his innovations took place at the mircro-level – within music’s inner palm. In this respect Brahms was far ahead of his time – and this fact explains what half a century later Arnold Schoenberg regards him as “progressive” and was referring to him for his own compositional theory.

While he explored every other avenue of musical composition -- including chamber music, concertos and symphonies -- Johannes Brahms never ventured into opera. Still, many critics hold him solely responsible for the revival of what they term "absolute" music. Part of a comprehensive series of films celebrating the most influential composers of all time, this educational program reviews the progression of his works and analyzes his creative genius.

Concise, all too brief, historically accurate accounts of shocking moments from the lives (or deaths) of famous composers. Brahms makes the list twice.

Conductor: Semyon Bychkov, Orchestra: Wdr Sinfonieorchester Köln, Composer: Johannes Brahms