The features of Brahms’ style are clearly marked. There are the wide spacing of accompaniment figures demanding a large hand and the free movement of the arm, the complicated rhythms, the frequent use of octaves with the sixth included, the generally deliberate treatment of material, the employment of low and high registers at once with little or nothing between, the lack of passage work to relieve the usual sombre coloring. The enthusiast will have little difficulty in imitating him. Yet it is doubtful if Brahms will have a successor in pianoforte music. What makes his work tolerable is the greatness of his ideas, and this greatness makes them sublime. His procedures in the employment of another will be cold and dull. It is safer to imitate the virtuoso style of Liszt, for that has an intrinsic charm. There are two concertos, one in D minor, opus 15, and one in B-flat major, opus 83. Brahms performed the first himself in Leipzig and was actually hissed from the stage. Yet it is a very great work, one of the few great concertos written for the pianoforte. A certain gloomy seriousness in the character of the themes stands in the way of its popular acceptance, and there are passages, notably in the middle movement, the ungainliness of which not even the most impassioned fancy or the deepest seriousness can disguise. The second concerto is longer and more brilliant. This, too, must be ranked with the earlier one, as one of the few great concertos, but chiefly by reason of the noble quality of the ideas, the mastery of art and form. Brahms’ treatment of the piano is nowhere conventionally pianistic. This second concerto is more than exceedingly difficult; but those qualities in the instrument which add a variety of color and light to the ensemble are for the most part not revealed in it. There is consequently a monotony that in so long a work is likely to prove tedious. A few figures and a few effects are peculiar to the pianoforte. These should rightfully be brought into prominence in a concerto. Mozart, Beethoven, and Schumann were able to do this, not in the least subtracting from the genuine value of their work, but rather adding to it. Brahms was less able to combine beauty and conventionality. Yet such a passage as the return to the first theme in the first movement of the second concerto shows a great appreciation of color; and there is a grandeur and dignity in both concertos, a wealth of romance in the first and of vitality in the second, as well, in the presence of which criticism may well be silent.