Ever since Schumann, in ‘Neue Bahnen’, told the world that a twenty-year-old unknown from Hamburg had played him ‘sonatas, or rather veiled symphonies’ (‘Sonaten, mehr verschleierte Symphonien’), Brahms's works have been open to charges of inconcinnity, or at least ambiguity, of genre. Wagner, in ‘On the Application of Music to Drama’ (‘Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama’, 1879), suggested a contrary formal mismatch: for him the Brahms symphonies were essentially ‘transplanted’ chamber music, ‘quintets and the like served up as symphonies’. This leitmotif was long recycled by Brahms's detractors, and some of his more discriminating friends. All polemics aside, certainly in Brahms the streams of orchestral, chamber and instrumental music flow in unusually close proximity. Seemingly these genres did not require any sharp differentiation in his expressive aims, or the means of their realisation: all partook equally of his highly personal synthesis of romantic, classical and pre-classical techniques, and his ongoing development of post-Beethovenian sonata discourse.

Brahms's orchestral scores, moreover, reflect his development of a genuine and original orchestral style which deployed colour neither for its own sake, nor for merely pictorial or anecdotal effect. His orchestration relates colour to structure, to embody and articulate a dramatic but intricately developing musical argument with the directness and clarity, the identity of idea and expressive medium, of the smaller, ‘purer’ ensembles of his chamber and instrumental works.