ABSTRACT
One reason why The Brahms Society decided to accept the invitation from The Society of the Friends of Music to transfer the celebration of the centennial of Brahms’ birth to Vienna, lies in the nature of his relationship to that city. For Brahms, as for Beethoven, Vienna became a second home, offering him the atmosphere and the stimuli which his North German temperament, highly vulnerable in its amalgam of a taciturn masculinity and an excessive sensitivity, so desperately needed.
