Music with Ease > Classical Music Quotes > Johannes Brahms Quotes

The classical composer par excellence of the present day, who free from any provincialism of expression or national dialect... writes for the whole world and for all time -- a giant, lofty and unapproachable -- Johannes Brahms
-- Edward Elgar, 1886

I have played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard!
-- Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1886

The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary... He is the most wanton of composers... Only his wantonness is not vicious; it is that of a great baby... rather tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven and making a prolonged and intolerable noise.
-- George Bernard Shaw, 1893

Brahms is just like Tennyson, an extraordinary musician, with the brains of a third rate village policeman.
-- George Bernard Shaw, 1893

Take Brahms: the product of the misty landscapes of north Germany, his works are full of groping, dreaminess and introspection. Mist gives a sense of infinity; it may be only two feet deep but equally it may cover the world, there is no knowing.
-- Yehudi Menuhin, Unfinished Symphony (1976)