It has been the misfortune of the musical world in Germany that every prominent musician is ranged by critics and amateurs in one of two hostile camps, and it was probably due in the main to the misrepresentations of the followers of Wagner that the idea was so generally held that Brahms was a man of narrow sympathies and hard, not to say brutal manners. The latter impression was fostered, no doubt, by the master's natural detestation of the methods by which the average lionizer seeks to gain his object, and both alike are disproved in the _Recollections_ of J.V. Widmann, an intimate friend for many years, which throw a new light on the master, revealing him as a man of the widest artistic sympathies, neither intolerant of excellence in a line opposed to his own, nor weakly enthusiastic over mediocre productions by composers whose views were in complete sympathy with him. His admiration for Verdi and Wagner is enough to show that the absence of any operatic work from his list of compositions was simply due to the difficulty of finding a libretto which appealed to him, not to any antagonism to the lyric stage in its modern developments. How far he stood from the prejudices of the typical pedant may be seen in the passionate love he showed throughout his life for national music, especially that of Hungary. Not only were his arrangements of Hungarian dances the first work by which his name was known outside his native land, but his first pianoforte quartet, op. 25 in G minor, incurred the wrath of the critics of the time by its introduction of some characteristics of Hungarian music into the finale. His arrangement of a number of children's traditional songs was published without his name, and dedicated to the children of Robert and Clara Schumann in the earliest years of his creative life; and among the last of his publications was a collection of forty-nine German Volkslieder, arranged with the utmost skill, taste and simplicity. He had a great admiration for the waltzes of Strauss, and in many passages of his own works the _entrain_ that is characteristic of the Viennese dance-writers is present in a striking degree.
See also W.H. Hadow, _Studies in Modern Music_ (2nd series, 1908); and the articles MUSIC, SONG. (J. A. F. M.)