Brahms: The Four Symphonies - Utah Symphony Orchestra, Maurice Abravanel

Brahms Symphonies Utah SO liner notes by rgbarbero9

Brahms was by nature the most self-critical of composers. His tendency in this case was fed by a formidable knowledge of the music of the past, unusual in a creative artist. And when he was only 20, Schumann's celebrated article of Neue Bahnen (New Paths), hailing him in Messianic terms as the rising composer of the day, must have reinforced the propensity with an added sense of responsibility to publicly aroused expectations. String quartet and symphony were the two spheres in which he felt the inhibition most powerfully, precisely because they were the two that evoked for him with special vividness the supremacy of Beethoven. It was another 20 years before he felt confident enough, in 1873, to release his own String Quartet No. I to the public (by which time he had already destroyed more than a dozen works in the genre), and a further three before he allowed his Symphony No. I in C Minor, Op. 68 to be performed.