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All the same, in ascending to his pedestal Brahms fulfilled Schumann’s prophecies only to be confronted by new trials. Looming in his path lay three historic genres he had skirted so far—symphony, string quartet, and opera. The musical world waited to see him wrestle the masters of the past on their own ground, and Wagner on his. No composer had put pen to paper with more expectations hanging over him, and Brahms understood that better than anybody else. During his lifetime the weight of the historical repertoire accumulated steadily, less and less in new works than in the preservation and resurrection of old. Above all, the full magnitude of J. S. Bach’s legacy was slowly revealed through the century. By its end, an unprecedented burden of past masterpieces lay on the shoulders of anyone trying to add to them.

It was in the early 1870s, still terrified at the prospect of going up against Beethoven, that Brahms spoke his famous words to conductor Hermann Levi: “I’ll never write a symphony! You have no idea how the likes of us feel when we’re always hearing a giant like that behind us.” The closer he came to string quartet and symphony, both of which he had attempted and so far failed to bring off, the louder the tramp of Beethoven and the other giants resounded in his mind. Yet he still felt driven to take up the challenge of symphony and quartet—was already doing it, in fact, when he vented his fears to Levi.

However cautious he was in practice, Brahms’s instincts drove him to master the most exacting trials. In the end, though, after years of toying with the idea of opera, he would hold back from that ordeal: as soon write an opera as marry, runs another of his famous lines, ones often repeated. His experiments toward the stage, mainly the cantata Rinaldo, had not boded well, nor was he particularly satisfied with most of the lieder he had composed by 1870. After the enormous effort of Ein deutsches Requiem, he struggled for years before he hit his stride again with a big piece, and that would be neither symphony nor quartet.

With the Requiem Brahms fulfilled Schumann’s prophecy—except for assuming the pose of Messiah. Schumann had made that prediction in hopes that Johannes would drive Liszt and his philistine minions from the temple of art, along with their blueprints for redeeming music. But after Brahms’s one attempt, with Joachim, to challenge the opposition with the ill-fated manifesto, he left musico/political ambitions to others. The manifesto widened a crack between factions into a gulf, but Brahms was too private a man to lead a faction, the direction of his art too personal, and he felt only disgust for the apocalyptic ambitions of Liszt and Wagner. Brahms was quite prepared to pull strings behind the scenes, but as an artist he modestly aspired to redeem only himself, to exalt only his listeners. If there are prophecies of the coming Modernist revolution in his work, in his own mind any approach to innovation was solitary, and must rise from a foundation in the past.

So while in the flush of success after the Requiem premiere Reinthaler declared it “an epoch-making work,” for all its popularity it remained a singular gesture, initiating no epoch, not even a new phase in Brahms’s style. He was ready to let epochs take care of themselves. As far as he was concerned, they were all headed downhill anyway. Meanwhile, Brahms understood Wagner’s achievement to be at once profound and no direct threat to him—unless he did take on an opera—and conversely felt certain that Liszt’s music for the concert hall could never challenge his own. (He wrote Karl Reinthaler in December 1871, “We experience Liszt’s Christus here on the 30th, and the thing appears so incredibly boring, stupid, and absurd that I can’t imagine how the necessary swindle will be perpetrated this time.”)1

For those who could not swallow the New Germans and Wagnerism, Brahms was the available alternative. The Schumanns and Joachim had understood that from the beginning—Johannes the antipope. Now Brahms fully inhabited