.

There are, however, certain names which stand out above all others and
at the present writing appear destined for place among or very near
the immortals of the first order. These great names are those of
Johannes Brahms, Camille Saint-Saens, Peter Ilitsch Tschaikowsky,
Antonin Dvorak and Edvard Grieg.

I. MUSIC IN GERMANY.

In Germany, very naturally, the activity in the higher departments of
music remains more intense than in any other country, and the seat of
musical empire may be said to still abide in southern Germany, where
it was established by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. The most eminent
living composer in the higher department of the art, Johannes Brahms,
resides at Vienna since these many years; there also Max Bruch long
resided, and there the greatest of the light opera composers, the
Strauss family and Von Suppe, have lived and worked. It is in the
provinces of the Austro-Hungarian empire, moreover, that the Bohemian
composer, Dvorak, has his home.

In Johannes Brahms (1833- ) we have still living a musical master of
the first order, whose quality as master is shown in his marvelous
technique, in which respect no recent composer is to be mentioned as
his superior, if any can be named since Bach his equal. This technique
was at first personal, at the pianoforte, upon which he was a virtuoso
of phenomenal rank; but this renown, great as it is in well informed
circles, sinks into insignificance beside his marvelous ability at
marshaling musical periods, elaborating together the most dissimilar
and apparently incompatible subjects, and his powers of varying a
given theme and of unfolding from it ever something new. These
wonderful gifts, for such they were rather than laboriously acquired
attainments, Brahms showed at the first moment when the light of
musical history shines upon him. It was in 1853, when the Hungarian
violinist, Edouard Remenyi, found him at Hamburgh and engaged him as
accompanist and having ascertained his astonishing talents, brought
him, a young man of twenty, to Liszt at Weimar, with his first trio
and certain other compositions in manuscript. The new talent made a
prodigious effect upon Liszt, who needed not that any one should
certify to him whether a composer had genius or merely talent. The
Liszt circle took up the Brahms cult in earnest, played the trio at
the chamber concerts, and the members when they departed to their
homes generally carried with them their admiration of t