Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)
Four Hand Piano Music Vol. l

To late nineteenth century German-speaking audiences Brahms was "the chosen one" of Schumann's eulogy, "over whose cradle Graces and Heroes have stood watch"; "a heavy, broad-shouldered, middle-class man, with the long beard of a professor ...with a somewhat rocking gait like an old Newfoundland dog... always ready to snap at friends and adversaries alike" (Max Graf, Composer and Critic, 1947). A century on, the American psychiatrist Peter F Ostwald (in Walter Frisch's symposium Brahms and His World, Princeton 1990), gives us a genius of opposites, a "solitary altruist". "Brahms," he says, "was a Janus-like figure who looked backward, seeking inspiration from the older Baroque and Classical traditions, while at the same time he looked forward and seemed the embodiment of modernism. A man of many contrasts, Brahms was devoted to his homeland in north Germany, but chose to live in southern Europe. H