Sospeso performs new orchestrations of songs by Brahms (a setting of poetry by Ludwig Hölty) at the Sospeso Cabaret program on April 16, 2005 at studioseven.

‘Brahms is everywhere’, observed the critic Walter Niemann in 1912 when assessing the composer's posthumous influence on contemporary piano music in Europe. Indeed, from about 1880 Brahms's music was a powerful model for younger composers. The Brahms ‘fog’, as Wilhelm Tappert disparagingly called this influence around 1890, had permeated the major conservatories in Austria and Germany, where Wagner's music was, at least officially, disapproved of. Furthermore, the external elements of Brahms's style – such as two-against-three rhythms, thick chords, and triadic melodies – lent themselves readily to imitation.

Composers such as Heinrich von Herzogenberg or the more talented Robert Fuchs had difficulty developing beyond the Brahmsian idiom. Other, mostly younger, composers, including Zemlinsky, Reger, Schoenberg, Busoni, Hindemith and Weill, absorbed Brahms's techniques with greater originality into styles that became the earliest manifestations of musical modernism.

Brahms's music also had a profound influence outside Austria and Germany, especially in England, on Hubert Parry, Stanford, Elgar and Vaughan Williams. Brahms is audible as well in French music, for example in the rhythmic and textural aspects of Fauré. Further to the east, Sergey Taneyev, who produced symphonic and chamber music with a strong Brahmsian stamp, was dubbed ‘the Russian Brahms’.

Well into the later 20th century a diverse array of composers acknowledged their indebtedness to Brahms. The complex motivic and rhythmic structures of Babbitt seek to extend Brahmsian precepts to their logical limits. Ligeti's lyrical Horn Trio (1982) is a direct homage to Brahms's trio op.40. Berio orchestrated the Clarinet Sonata op.120 no.1 (1984–6), adding a few introductory bars of his own to the first two movements. His effort recalls the earlier one of Schoenberg, who in 1937 arranged the Piano Quartet op.25 for large orchestra.

The critical reception of Brahms's music was unique among the major Classical and Romantic composers. Schumann's 1853 encomium of Brahms as the one destined to ‘give expression to his age in an ideal fashion’ had powerful repercussions, both negative and positive. For many years afterwards, he was judged by the standards and hopes expressed by Schumann. Sometimes willingly, sometimes not, Brahms became a lightning rod in the major musical-aesthetic tempest of the later 19th century. He was cast in direct opposition to the Lisztians and Wagnerites; his preferred genres of chamber music, lieder and symphony were set against the more modern forms of music drama and symphonic poem.

An unusual paradox became apparent in reactions to Brahms's music from about the period of the German Requiem. Even as he was acknowledged as a master, and his works entered the standard repertory and then the canon, there were strong reservations about his music. His technical prowess was never in doubt, but his music was felt to lack true originality and expressiveness. These views were held even by such staunch allies as Hanslick and Kalbeck.

Beethoven was the yardstick against which Brahms was constantly measured. For Louis Köhler in 1880, Brahms would never rise above epigonal status; without spiritual qualities he could be ‘no kind of Beethoven’. In 1918 Paul Bekker advanced one of the main theories of Brahms reception, which had already been adumbrated as early as 1879 by Wagner: Brahms was essentially a composer of chamber music. For Bekker, Brahms's was a small-scale, bourgeois mentality, incapable of the ‘society-forming’ (gesellschaftsbildend) impulse that led Beethoven to write the Ninth Symphony. Brahms's symphonies were to Bekker no more than ‘monumentalized chamber music’.

Some years later, Theodor Adorno, and after him Carl Dahlhaus, radically inverted the Wagner-Bekker characterization from a defect to a virtue. The chamber-music qualities of Brahms's symphonic music were now deemed to be the most forward-looking aspect of his work. According to this view, the intricate textures and continuous motivic variation were harbingers of 20th-century music, especially that of the Schoenberg school. For Adorno, writing in 1940, Brahms's music represented the first time in Western music that the ‘subjective’ elements of thematic development determined ‘objective’ formal structures.

Adorno anticipated a better-known articulation of this position, an essay by Schoenberg that, beside Schumann's article, is the most renowned piece of Brahms reception. In ‘Brahms the Progressive’, originally prepared as a radio talk for the Brahms centenary of 1933 and revised in 1947, Schoenberg admired the compact richness of his harmonic language and his ability to spin themes, sections and even entire compositions from a few small motifs. For Schoenberg, these procedures of Stufenreichtum (abundance of scale degrees) and ‘developing variation’ paved the way towards an ‘unrestricted musical language’ of the 20th century.

Half a century after the appearance of Schoenberg's article (in Style and Idea, 1950), such special pleading for Brahms no longer seems necessary. His works continue to be mainstays on the concert stage and in recordings. There have been impressive achievements in documentary, historical and analytical research, and in performing practice, partly resulting from activities of the Brahms anniversary years 1983 and 1997. All this activity suggests that the special combination of beauty and integrity in his music continues to exert considerable appeal in a postmodern age.

Walter Frisch, in the New Grove.