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The Composer. Not always would Boston, have deemed the music of Brahms worthy of festival performance by its celebrated symphony orchestra. Just as Boston's Brahmins have always been conservative in their choice of acquaintances, so (until the arrival of Conductor Koussevitzky six years ago) have Bostonians been reluctant to hear unfamiliar music. Brahms they long ago dismissed as "austere," "obscure," "dull." Even wise Philip Hale, septuagenarian critic of the Boston Herald, once wrote: "Over the exit doors of Symphony Hall could well be written 'This way out in case of Brahms!'''' Europe, too, was slow in accepting the simple, lower-middle-class German who disdained to be a showman. Save as it involved the making of music, there was little in Brahms' career to attract attention. He had no sensational lovelife, no ravaging disease, could usually afford to eat. But on his first concert tour, when accompanying the Hungarian violinist, Eduard Remenyi, he was confronted with a piano a halftone off pitch. From memory and without the violinist's knowledge Brahms transposed the entire Kreutzer Sonata. This feat won him the attention of Violinist Joseph Joachim through whom he met Liszt and the Schumanns. Robert Schumann publicly recommended him as the genius of the day. Schumann's pianist-wife, Clara, became Brahms' great and life-long friend, the one to whom he submitted all his compositions, whose suggestions he invariably accepted. His devotion to her was the outstanding feature of his life. For the rest, he held teaching positions in Detmold, Hamburg, and Vienna. In Vienna, his headquarters for 35 years, everyone came to recognize the great bearded head, the colored shirts worn without collars, the little alpaca coat, the trousers too short, the long, black cigars. Appearances meant nothing to Johannes Brahms. On rainy days he wore an old-fashioned bluish-green shawl fastened in front with an enormous pin. His concern was music—molding deep, original ideas to fit established forms, thus earning the title of the last of the great classical composers. He wrote for the piano, the voice, for chamber and symphony orchestra; never for the theatre, never in any way for acoustical effect. Death came to him at 63, the immediate result of a cold contracted at Clara Schumann's funeral.