7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7Brahms was acutely conscious of this loss, repudiated
it, and set himself to compensate for it in order to keep
alive a force he felt strongly was far from spent. But Brahms
was desirous not of reproducing old styles but of infusing
the language of his own time with constructive power.
Thus his musical language actually bears little resemblance
to Beethoven’s or even Schubert’s; harmonically it was
much influenced by Schumann and even to some extent
by Wagner. It is Brahms’s supple and masterful control of
rhythm and movement that indeed distinguishes him
from all his contemporaries. This power of movement
stems partly from his reverence for music of the distant
past, specifically for the polyphonic school of the 16th
century, elements of which he incorporated into his work.
In his orchestral works Brahms displays an unmistakable
and highly distinctive deployment of tone colour, especially
in his use of woodwind and brass instruments and in his
string writing, but the important thing about it is that
colour is deployed, rather than laid on for its own sake. A
close relationship between orchestration and architecture
dominates these works, with the orchestration contribut-
ing as much to the tonal colouring as do the harmonies
and tonalities and the changing nature of the themes.
Brahms was peculiarly adapted to the more subtle aspects of
the relation between orchestra and soloist, and he set himself
to recover the depth and grandeur of the concerto idea. He
realized that the long introductory passage of the orchestra
was the means of sharpening and deepening the complex
relationship of orchestra to solo, especially when the time
came for recapitulation, where an entirely new and often
revelatory distribution of themes, keys, instrumentation,
and tensions was possible.
Brahms also was a masterly miniaturist, not only in
many of his fine and varied songs but also in his cunningly
wrought late piano works. As a song composer, he ranged