Brahms, the musical Browning, is, musically speaking, a son of Schumann and a grandson of Beethoven.  While even Brahms did not escape the influence of Wagner, nor that of the romanticists Schubert and Chopin, still, in his essence, he represents reaction against modern romanticism and an atavistic return to the spirit of Beethoven.  He has been, for decades, the idol of Wagner’s enemies; yet, in truth, there was no occasion for opposing these two men, since they worked in entirely different fields.  Brahms wrote no operas, while Wagner wrote little but operas.  The real antagonist of Brahms is Liszt, who also worked only for the concert hall and who represents poetic or pictorial music (programme music), while Brahms stands for absolute music, or music per se, without any poetic affiliations.

While Schubert in his youth also came under the influence of his great contemporary, Beethoven, he soon emancipated himself completely from him, even in the symphony, in which, as Schumann pointed out, he opened up “an entirely new world” of melody, color, and emotion.  His orchestration is more varied, euphonious, and enchanting than Beethoven’s, and in this direction he did for the symphony what Weber did for the opera.  By using the brass instruments pianissimo, for color instead of for loudness, he opened a path in which later masters, including Wagner, eagerly followed him.  Schubert was also the first composer who revealed the exquisite beauty and the great emotional power of the freest modulation from key to key.  His poetic impromptus for piano became the model for Mendelssohn’s “Songs without Words,” and the multitudinous forms of modern short pieces, while his melodious, dainty, graceful valses were the forerunners of the exquisite dance-music which subsequently made Vienna famous, and which reached its climax in Johann Strauss the younger, universally known as “the waltz king.”

In all these respects, Schubert was epoch-making; and if the beautiful details he suggested to his successors up to the present day could be taken out of their works there would be some surprising blanks.  Especially also is this true in the realm of lyric song, for, as everybody knows, he practically created the art song as we know and love it.  The greatest of his immediate successors, Schumann and Franz, cheerfully admitted that they could never have written such songs as they gave the world but for Schubert, and the same confession might be made by the latest of the great songwriters, Grieg, Richard Strauss, and our American MacDowell.  Schubert’s best songs have never been equalled.  They belong in the realm of modern music quite as much as Wagner’s music-dramas and Liszt’s symphonic poems.