Brahms had a fondness for variation form—it played out again and again in his piano and chamber works—and for forms and procedures associated with “old” music, that is, the Baroque. Chief among these were fugue (in Ein deutsches Requiem and the monumental Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24, for piano), passacaglia (in the finales of the Variations on a Theme by Haydn and the Fourth Symphony), and canon (employed frequently in his works, e.g., the opening subject of the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, where it is cleverly concealed by the orchestration). Both formally and in terms of the richness of their content and discourse, Brahms’s symphonies and concertos are the finest contributions to their genres penned in the second half of the 19 th century; for the same reasons, his chamber pieces (especially the instrumental sonatas) and songs (a total of about 200) are essential to the repertoire. Musicians have always loved this music because, as was surely Brahms’s intention, everything in it is substantive.

In his understanding of harmony Brahms was remarkably sophisticated, as he was in his predilection for rich, freely organized polyphonic textures in which the constituent lines are treated not as counterpoint in the traditional sense, but as parts of a living tissue of independent melodic elements. Mahler would continue this line of thinking, as would Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Perhaps most advanced of all was Brahms’s acceptance of rhythm as an element of musical language on the same plane as melody and harmony, a view whose implications were felt throughout the music of the 20th century. His use of devices such as hemiola, accented offbeats, and cross rhythms to build and sustain powerful climaxes remains virtually unrivaled.
 

Aside from Bruckner, who was nine years older, and Dvorak, who was eight years younger, it is hard to think of any contemporaries in the German-speaking world—European music’s inner sanctum— who stood anywhere close to Brahms. In the final two decades of his life he fully vindicated Schumann’s prediction of greatness and took his place as the greatest instrumental composer of his day, richly deserving of the salutation he received in 1879 when the University of Breslau conferred on him an honorary doctorate in philosophy; “Artis musicae severioris in Germania nunc princeps” (“To the leading master of serious music in Germany”). The 20th century would see even more in him than his contemporaries did. Schoenberg would hail him as the agent of “great innovations in musical language,” and he would also be credited with having brought about, in a time of heady Romantic expressionism, the renovation of music as an abstract art and the resuscitation of its traditional forms. Today the repertoire is filled with his works, and his approach—that of the progressive conservative—has become a model for composers eager to connect with audiences.