Of the pieces which are more specifically art-songs we must admit a gradual change in character corresponding to the general change in Brahms’ music from the ‘romantic’ to the ‘classic.’ Of course, this change has been overemphasized in superficial Brahms criticism. It was not so much Brahms who changed; it was the lay of the land. Music became much more sensuous and free and formless. Brahms became still more himself. The revolutionary Brahms of 1850 was a conservative Brahms in 1880. But, undoubtedly, where Schumann expected him to look forward, Brahms chose in many things to look backward--or, rather, perhaps, to look inward. And so we feel in Brahms’ music as a whole that it becomes stranger and more reserved as the man matures. He became more interested in the things that had ceased to interest the rabble, and less interested in the things which scores of new and radical composers were beginning to do very well. And we can feel this change in his songs. The earliest ones--in opus 3--are filled with the joy of spontaneous creation. The so-called ‘classic’ virtues seemed the last things the composer was thinking about. But the songs were in a pretty strict strophic form and their intelligence was at least equal to their exuberance. And it was these formal and intellectual qualities, and not the others, which were to receive the chief emphasis and intensification as the composer matured. To Schumann, Brahms was the continuer of Schumann. To the world he became the continuer of Beethoven.