In so doing, he was well aware of the danger of being a composer born too late, no longer belonging to those happy times when the musician could create at the order of a society to which he belonged, and when the individual still was borne along by the spirit of the community. Liszt was a child of the culture of his time, a culture which became a burden to him Brahms was one of those rare 19th-century musicians who were born of simple musician fathers, yet appropriated to themselves all the culture of their time. Liszt was the most European or cosmopolitan or Parisian of all musicians Brahms was so very national, so much in the mainstream of the German tradition as created by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and the German folk song, that his effectiveness can never go beyond certain limits. Liszt proclaimed the fusion of music and poetry Brahms kept secret all his impulses (the few inscriptions that exist in his works tell us little more about their real content than do the nicknames ‘Kegelstatt’ Trio and the ‘Sparrow’ Mass in Mozart).

Liszt was a rhapsodist Brahms adhered to acceptable, strict form, from beginning to end. Brahms was becoming more and more conscious of the possibility of finding models in the past, and was reaching back further and further into it. Liszt was a composer who scorned tradition and in the most real sense of the word stood irreverently before the past, even though he was too good a musician not to recognize the greatness of individual masters. The composer who is really antipodal to Liszt, not to Wagner, is Johannes Brahms.

Johannes brahms compositions