The Parzenlied, received with enthusiasm throughout Brahms' tour in Germany and Switzerland, was not equally successful in Vienna, where it was heard for the first time at the Gesellschaft concert of February 18 under Gericke. The austere simplicity of the music, which paces majestically onward with the concentrated, resigned calm of despair, adds extraordinary force to Goethe's poem, but does not appeal to every audience, and the work has never become a prime favourite in the Austrian Kaiserstadt. The song is set for six-part chorus with orchestra, in plainer harmonic masses and with less employment of imitative counterpoint than we usually find in the works of Brahms, who has accommodated his music here, as in 'Nänie,' to the classical spirit of the text. A singular deviation, however, which occurs in the course of the setting, from the uncompromising severity of the words, furnishes a remarkable illustration of the composer's unconquerable idealism. Comment was made in its place on the beautiful device by which he has sought to relieve the dark mood of Hölderlin's 'Song of Destiny'--the addition of an instrumental postlude which breathes forth a message of tender consolation that the poet could hardly have rendered in words. In Schiller's 'Nänie' the lament, with all its calm, gives expression to a sentiment of compassionate sorrow that is perfectly reproduced in the master's music. Goethe's Fates, however, in their measured recitation of the gods' relentless cruelty, would have seemed to offer no possible opportunity for even the inarticulate expression of ruth. Least of all, it might be imagined, could any concession to the demands of the human heart have been found in the penultimate stanza of their song: 'The rulers exclude from Their favouring glances Entire generations, And heed not in children The once so belovèd And still speaking features Of distant forefathers.'