Vaughan Williams was an eclectic composer and he required a period of twenty years to find his individual voice. Much emphasis has, in the past, been placed on the ‘breakthrough’ of folk song and on the composer’s supposed admittance of technical inferiority during this lengthy period of stylistic discovery. It is argued here, however, that this supposed affliction was due as much to a public-school self-modesty and that, in truth, he was no less advanced than his major peers. Moreover, this chapter attempts to accentuate the importance of his compositional ‘training’, under Parry, Charles Wood, Alan Gray, Stanford, Max Bruch, and Ravel, and, more particularly, the numerous continental and home-grown influences (notably Wagner and Parry), over and above the revelation of folk song in 1903, which played a dominant role in shaping his later style.

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 Each reacted to these unpublished works in distinctive ways.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.