For most of his life and about a half-century after his death, Brahms was pigeonholed as a conservative composer: a superb craftsman, sure, but a bit of a bore and a fusty relic. Few music fans today remember the heated rhetoric that polarized partisans in the so-called War of the Romantics — a mostly bloodless, decades-long ideological battle of the bands in which concertgoers had to swear allegiance to either Team Wagner or Team Brahms — and that’s just as well. Crude categories and false dichotomies have never served any true artist, certainly not one as complex and contradictory as Brahms.

Brahms was at once an antiquarian and an experimentalist, a conservative classicist and a singular romantic. One of his more surprising champions, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, delivered a lecture in 1933, 100 years after Brahms’s birth, titled “Brahms the Progressive.” In this appreciation, which Schoenberg revised and expanded in 1947, the contrarian serialist reclaims “…Brahms, the classicist, the academician,” calling him “a great innovator in the realm of musical language.”

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In his prime Brahms was an impressive pianist, but unlike Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Mozart, he couldn’t play the violin. Fortunately, he was close friends with Joseph Joachim, the influential Hungarian-born violinist, composer and conductor. Although Joachim was only two years older than Brahms, he was already an established performer when he befriended the young Hamburg native in 1853. A child prodigy, Joachim was mentored by Felix Mendelssohn; it was his 1844 performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, under Mendelssohn’s baton, that secured its place in the repertoire. Through Joachim, Brahms met Robert and Clara Schumann, who would become his most essential mentors and allies: Robert in his capacity as colleague and prolific critic; Clara as the leading interpreter of Brahms’s piano works and his preferred sounding board.

In the summer of 1878, when Brahms began work on the Violin Concerto, he was 45 years old, with two well-regarded symphonies and one piano concerto under his belt. Despite his lack of proficiency on violin, he wasn’t especially anxious about the project. Joachim, whose own Hungarian Concerto remained popular, was generous with his time and talent. For the rest of that year, the two men composed by correspondence, with Joachim offering technical advice, rewriting tricky passages and even composing the only cadenza, in the first movement.

Puzzling Partners

Brahms was a relentless perfectionist, and he irritated Joachim by soliciting feedback only to ignore it. More maddening still, Brahms announced that he was deleting the two middle movements, which Joachim had been diligently practicing for weeks: “I’m writing a wretched adagio instead,” the composer explained, falling back on his usual evasive irony.

The concerto was finished by the deadline—just barely. The four-movement work they’d originally envisioned was now a more conventional three movements, but it was far from conventional otherwise. The loyal Joachim pronounced it a masterpiece, but few of their contemporaries agreed. Most listeners were put off by its daring, destabilizing rhythms and its oddly democratic instrumentation. Brahms had given the orchestra and soloist equal roles, which made it seem like an anti-concerto to purists, who were, to be fair, never his natural audience anyway.

The 1879 premiere was disappointing. The Leipzig audience was politely underwhelmed. In fact, for decades after his death, the Violin Concerto was widely dismissed as a failed experiment: dry, severe, pointlessly difficult. The conductor Josef Hellmesberger famously dubbed it “a concerto not for, but against, the violin.” Brahms was so dismayed by its reception that he destroyed his second violin concerto before allowing anyone to hear it, and he never composed another.

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The same characteristics that baffled his contemporaries are now so commonplace that we tend to forget how deeply radical this work sounded to late-19th-century ears. Brahms was a big fan of hemiola, the ancient practice of setting two beats against triple meter or three beats against duple meter; the Violin Concerto teems with such rhythmic effects. The opening Allegro non troppo builds slowly to its lyrical climax, with numerous Roma-inspired excursions in honor of its dedicatee’s Hungarian roots. This unusually long movement begins in its home key — pretty, pastoral D major — but the solo violin, accompanied by timpani in an obvious nod to Beethoven, enters in a somewhat jarring D minor. The central Adagio, with its blissful F-major oboe melody suspended over gossamer wind harmonies, is dreamy, delicate and anything but “wretched.” The oboe tune elicits the solo violin’s variation, and the new idea inspires a stormy middle section (in F-sharp minor) before circling back to serenity.

Brahms marked the finale “Allegro Giocoso ma non troppo vivace,” (“jocularly cheerful, but not too lively”). This lusty quasi-rondo is a technical terror, brimming over with tricky double-stops, harrowing rhythmic tensions and folky fireworks. Even Joachim had to perform it several times before he felt comfortable with the breakneck passagework. “One enjoys getting hot fingers playing it,” he later declared, “because it’s worth it.”

The first time Anton Bruckner met Richard Wagner, he fell to the ground yelping, “Master, I worship you!” In 1873, the awkward, aging church musician made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, uninvited and only grudgingly welcomed, so that he could show Wagner the score to his Third Symphony, dedicated “in deepest veneration to the honourable Herr Richard Wagner, the unattainable, world-famous and exalted Master of Poetry and Music by Anton Bruckner.” Not for the first time in his life, nor the last, Bruckner made a dismal impression. In her diary Wagner’s wife, Cosima, dissed him as “the poor Viennese organist.”

Wagner was an odd choice of idol for the provincial late-bloomer. Bruckner was as timid as Wagner was egomaniacal. Bruckner was also a devout Catholic, whereas Wagner’s religion — if he had one at all — was a tangle of Schopenhauer, medieval Christian legend, Teutonic myth and rank self-interest. Bruckner, a pious probable virgin, never delved too deeply into the wanton weirdness of Wagner’s texts, and he mostly squeezed his eyes shut when he beheld the music dramas. At any rate, none of that mattered to Bruckner. At 41, while attending the Munich premiere of Tristan und Isolde, he got sucked into his Master’s sound world, never to emerge. He found his own voice by channeling Wagner’s.

A Long Apprenticeship

Bruckner is often called a late bloomer, but it’s more accurate to say he had an unusually long apprenticeship. His life in music began in Ansfelden, Austria, where his father served as village schoolmaster and church organist. The eldest of 11 children, young Anton assumed organist duties when his father became ill. After his father’s death, the 12-year-old was sent to St. Florian, an Augustinian monastery, where he studied organ, piano, violin and music theory. He remained there for a decade after he graduated: teaching, improvising at the organ, poring over Bach scores and composing his first major works, a Requiem and a Mass.

In 1855 he began studying counterpoint with Simon Sechter; later that year he became the cathedral organist in Linz, a position he held for 13 years. He continued his lessons with Sechter by correspondence. Even after earning a teaching certification from the Vienna Conservatory, Bruckner still wasn’t done with his musical education. At 37 he began studying orchestration and composition with Otto Kitzler, who introduced him to the music of Richard Wagner and changed his life forever.

The summer of 1876, five years before he began his Symphony No. 7, Bruckner made a second pilgrimage to Bayreuth, where, like Tchaikovsky, he attended the first complete performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle. He was so inspired by the experience that he undertook major revisions of several earlier works.

Lucky Seven

Bruckner’s early career as a symphonist had mostly consisted of stinging public humiliations. It wasn’t until his Seventh Symphony that Bruckner, now age 60, enjoyed any popular success as a composer. His Seventh Symphony was even more Wagnerian than his Third, the effusively dedicated “Wagner” symphony.

The premiere took place on December 30, 1884, performed by the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig under the baton of Arthur Nikisch. According to the conductor’s admiring assessment, “Since Beethoven there has been nothing that could even approach it.” Bruckner, for his part, basked in the lengthy ovations after each movement — an unusual treat for someone accustomed to jeers and hisses.

Although the Seventh Symphony is sometimes dubbed the “Lyric,” this nickname did not originate with the composer. Bruckner did add a dedication after the Munich performance, settling on “H.M., King Ludwig II of Bavaria, in deepest reverence.” Mad King Ludwig was more than a flamboyant Bavarian superfan; he was rich enough to pay off all Wagner’s debts and obsessed enough to underwrite his extravagant music-dramas. Bruckner revered Ludwig because Ludwig, often single-handedly, enabled Wagner to be Wagner.

Movement by Movement

Composed between September 1881 and September 1883, the massive four-movement symphony begins, like Beethoven’s Ninth, in pure tonal potentiality. Against this fertile chaos of tremolo strings and holy-throated cellos, Bruckner pitches melodic fragments until something sticks: a noble, arching melody that passes from cellos to horns, from violas to clarinets. Bruckner later claimed that he heard the tune in a dream, played on a viola, and then wrote it down as soon as he woke up, but it also contains an obvious quotation from his Mass in D minor, which he was then revising. As it develops, the Allegro moderato forsakes the home key of E major for B minor and B major, flirting with still more remote tonalities — and steering clear of the relative minor, C-sharp — before vaulting back toward home again.

For the gorgeous, grief-stunned Adagio, Bruckner finally lands on the obvious choice of C-sharp, the home key’s relative minor. Eventually, the second movement winds up in the unexpected key of C-major, marking the achievement with crashing cymbal and pinging triangle. Bruckner began writing this movement in January 1883, after a premonition about Wagner’s death. “One day I came home and felt very sad,” he wrote in a letter. “The thought had crossed my mind that before long the Master would die, and then the C-sharp minor theme of the Adagio came to me.” In addition to a contrabass tuba, the score boasts four Wagner tubas, which had never before appeared outside of the Ring cycle. On February 13, 1883, while Bruckner was finishing the Adagio, Wagner suffered a fatal heart attack in Venice. After Bruckner found out, he wrote an epiphanic, elegiac coda, which he called “the funeral music for the Master.”

In sharp contrast, the rugged, galumphing scherzo, in A minor, pits an undulant ostinato bass against pealing trumpets and a scrum of violins. Resembling a rustic Austrian Ländler dance, a kind of brisk waltz, the central trio section, in F major, revels in melody and graceful ease.

Veering between the earthy and the sublime, the whimsical and the profound, the finale revisits the cosmic flux of the opening before restoring, in its final, thrilling expression, the celestial light of E major. While he was putting the finishing touches on the last movement, Bruckner went to Bayreuth to visit Wagner’s grave. He finished the score soon after his return. The proceeds from the premiere helped pay for a new Wagner monument.