Playing one of Brahms’ muses

In 1996, Annabel Capper took a small role playing Elisabeth von Herzogenberg (née von Stockhausen) in the controversial film, Brahms & the Little Singing Girls, with respected director Tony Palmer. (if you thought Between the Sheets was pornographic, I’d recommend that you avoid this film like the plague. According to the blurb in the DVD container, the film’s never been shown in Britain, and someone at the BBC is quoted as remarking that the film is “disgusting.”). Ms. Capper’s work was uncredited (in contrast to that of the Little Singing Girls, who appear topless, repeatedly, and are credited. Capper bears a passing resemblance to one of them — but it’s not her breasts we are seeing. Whew! Given the film’s preoccupation with the more prurient aspects of Brahms’s life — his stories about working as a teenager as a brothel musician, his aborted engagement to Agathe von Siebold, and his intense but apparently unfulfilled attachment to Clara Schumann — I was wondering whether the filmmaker was trying to make a point by having the same actress play both a prostitute and Herzogenberg, but I’ve watched those scenes closely a few times and I am pretty sure it’s a different actress; plus the credits say it’s a different actress). In a way it’s too bad if it’s never been shown in England — it’s artistically a strong production, I think, but if no one saw it, that doesn’t help her out much, does it? What makes it artistically strong? I think the script does a good job of integrating various Brahms compositions into a basic life narrative of the composer, and the musical performances, many of them by the NDR Symphony Orchestra and Choir, one of my favorite German ensembles, are very strong. Taken together, the narrative of the film and the interspersed musical performances give us a good sense both of the way that life-long passions affected Brahms’s work, and of the energies of the late Romantic period in central European music altogether. And the film shows rather than telling, which I always appreciate.

Annabel Capper in Brahms & the Little Singing Girls

Brahms met Elisabeth when he worked briefly as her piano teacher; she was an accomplished pianist and seems to have written a few song settings herself, which were published together with those of her husband, Heinrich, who was a well-known and prolific composer in his own age but whose work is now mostly forgotten or seen as imitative of Brahms’ oeuvre. In the film, we get our first glance of her for just a second, playing a musical instrument, possibly a banjo of some kind, and cut into a scene of the Schumann family Christmas, which is a bit confusing — she was a pianist, first of all, and it seems unlikely she’d have spent Christmas with the Schumanns. It’s just a brief cut.

Later, we see her out walking on a country picnic with the great composer himself, played by Warren Mitchell. She’s supposed to be quite young in this scene, apparently in her late teens.

Brahms dedicated several works to Elisabeth and kept her picture on his desk. He respected her critical opinion more than that of her husband. Ms. Capper looks beautiful in this sequence; she doesn’t have to do much, but she definitely hits the target of the beauty ideal of the mid- to late-nineteenth-century young woman right on the money. She’s got both the body for it, and the dramatic energy. Too bad we couldn’t see more of her here. (More acting. Not more skin.)

~ by Servetus on December 15, 2010.