'The Viennese,' he wrote, 'are much more easily satisfied than we. We make quite different demands on Brahms, and require from him music which is something more than "pretty" and "very pretty" when he comes before us as a symphonist. Not that we do not wish to hear him in his complaisant moods, not that we disdain to accept from him pictures of real life, but we desire always to contemplate his genius, whether he displays it in a manner of his own, or depends on that of Beethoven. We have not discovered genius in the new symphony and should hardly have guessed it to be the work of Brahms had it been performed anonymously. We should have recognised the great mastery of form, the extremely skilful handling of the material, the conspicuous power of construction in short, which it displays, but should not have described it as pre-eminently distinguished by inventive power. We should have pronounced the work to be one worthy of respect, but not counting for much in the domain of symphony. Perhaps we may be mistaken; if so, the error should be pardonable, arising as it does from the great expectations which our reverence for the composer induced us to form.' Possibly Dörffel's expectations had been founded too definitely upon his admiration of the first symphony, which may have caused him to take for granted that he would find in the second a reiteration of the exalted moods of its predecessor. The two works should not, however, be weighed in the balance one against the other, but should be considered side by side for the reason that they are not only different, but, as it were, supplementary. The first partakes of the nature of an epic in so far as it is conceived on a grand scale and is dominated throughout three of its four movements by a passionate intensity of feeling which is occupied only with the sublimities, whether of pain or of joy, and which, even after the pain has been conquered, seems to touch the joy theme itself with the pathos of a past tragedy. The second symphony is an idyll that is chiefly animated by the spirit of pure happiness and gently tender grace. A second symphony quickly following the first, which had shown any attempt to emulate that great work on its own ground, must of necessity have been doomed to result in artistic failure. The second symphony which the master actually wrote was one which, whilst it probably satisfied a need of his mind for the refreshment of change, was the appropriate sequel to its predecessor both in regard to its calm serenity of mood and to the clear melody of the thematic material in which the mood is so perfectly expressed. Those who are inexorable in their demands for 'originality' may, however, be referred to the 'adagio non troppo,' which, with its melodious phrases and its beautiful tone effects, its varied rhythms and its mysterious