Throughout his lifetime, Brahms accompanied dozens of singers in a variety of settings, ranging from huge public halls to his friends’ homes, and conducted many others in choirs. Some of those working relationships were one-offs, arising from the widespread practice of including a set of piano-accompanied songs within most concerts and the expediency and cost-effectiveness of using local talent. Others were deep, enduring partnerships; the timbres and interpretative approaches of those singers are surely ingrained in his vocal music. Overall, Brahms’s singers were generally not part of the international operatic elite associated with Verdi, Bizet and Massenet. Figures like Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) and Raimund von Zur-Mühlen (1854–1931)were almost exclusively concert singers and, later on, teachers. Most hailed from German-speaking territories, reflecting Brahms’s own concert career.

When Brahms’s Violin Concerto Op. 77 received its British premiere at the Crystal Palace on 22 February 1879, George Grove began his programme note to the piece: ‘Mr Brahms is no stranger to the Crystal Palace audience; in fact he is very well known here, for his name appears more frequently in the Saturday Programmes than that of almost any other contemporary composer.’

It is certainly true that Brahms’s popularity with British audiences increased significantly from the 1870s onwards as initial suspicion of his complex writing was replaced by growing admiration, particularly for his chamber and orchestral works. However, Brahms himself never visited the country – in fact, he turned down at least six separate invitations to do so, from potential festival commissions to performance opportunities, and two attempts to coax him to Cambridge University to receive an honorary doctorate.

The reception of Brahms’s music beyond his home city of Hamburg began in 1853, when the young composer made his first extended journey and presented his compositions to some of the leading figures of German contemporary music: Robert Schumann, Robert Franz and Franz Liszt. Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.

Robert Schumann, with whom Brahms spent the whole month of October in Düsseldorf,was instantly enthralled.

Although Brahms was a fine pianist and the composer of major repertory for the instrument, he is not normally regarded as having established a ‘school’ of performance as such; certainly not like his pianist-composer contemporaries Liszt and Anton Rubinstein whose numerous students promoted their teaching through technical features of performance. Although Brahms wrote an extensive set of exercises – the 51 Exercises WoO 6 (published in 1893, but apparently dating from the 1850s and 1860s) – which clearly address the technical requirements of his own works, he often showed little interest in public performance and did not especially promote his piano works apart from the concertos (at least on the inconsistent evidence of documented first performances). By comparison, he premiered virtually all his piano chamber music: only one work, the First Piano Quartet Op. 25 was definitely not given by him [see Ch. 9 ‘As Pianist’].