The Welsh issue also seems rather peculiar in the context of a thread where I think most people are in agreement that nationalism is not a particularly good thing (not that they agree on anything else).

Nothing.

Oh, I'm quite sure that I do!

I do seem to remember that he once pointed out, albeit en passant, that he was either "foreign" or "non-British" or something - but it's not that big a deal for me (as another non-Brit); I certainly wasn't seeking to make a specific point by mentioning it.

Well, I've answered as best I can. I hope that I've not offended Richard in any way, for such was most certainly not my intention. Anyway, I'm just a Scotsman, so what do I know?!...

Well, to give an example of a work of Brahms that to me is very 'open', ambiguous, far from constraining the space for the listener (on the contrary, through it's very ambiguity and uncertainty inviting the listener to enter into their own very individual engagement as much with what is not said as what is), I'd like to cite this song that I posted on another thread.

(there are many other songs that exhibit similar qualities, in various manifestations)

Some might see that as negative I suppose. I have a feeling that's a view from another direction of exactly the concentration that makes Brahms so powerful for me. On the whole I think I prefer that to music which spreads itself too thin...

What seems to me to be being described is what a certain TWA described as the 'spatialisation of musical time', for which he criticised Bruckner, Wagner, and Stravinsky, but identified Brahms as a composer who resists such tendencies very strongly (as, perhaps even more so, did Schoenberg, at least in his mid-period). There are very few places in Brahms where material is allowed just to 'run its course', let alone simply being repeated (this was the aspect of Stravinsky that broke most radically with that particular Germanic tradition). Rather it is almost always dynamic, in a state of flux, highly subjectivised, and I suppose some find that can be overbearing (I don't, though I'm not as thoroughly opposed to spatialisation as Adorno was, either). In this sense, Brahms in his symphonies in particular broke with that particular tendency in earlier symphonic writing (very pronounced in Beethoven), one reason why his orchestra works sound to some like chamber music (which had tended to emphasise the more hyper-subjective tendencies) writ on a large scale. Bruckner is utterly different in this respect. But this approach to me links Brahms in some ways more with Mozart than Beethoven. And in Mozart's work I similarly find simultaneously a sense of fully 'occupying' the space that is inhabited, but in such a way that continues to leave a strong apprehension of what lies 'outside'. In both cases I find the results extraordinarily powerful. strina's point about aiming for pinnacles that are never quite reached also seems very acute; that is quite unlike Mozart, but is one of the primary reasons for the deeply melancholy aspect of very much of Brahms's music.

But, in light of the multi-faceted nature of Brahms's allusions (to bring back to the original subject of the thread), more so than practically any other composer of his time (at least in terms of their diversity - Liszt may have transcribed a very wide range of composers, but the absorption of their work more deeply into his compositional language was not remotely of the same order), and the continual willingness to do so and forever learn from and engage with other music (right throughout his career), I'm surprised at the characterisation of his world as refusing to admit anything outside of it. What Brahms hardly ever did (except perhaps in some of the very early works) is engage with other musics, materials, worlds, in a spirit of exoticism, with that mixture of wide-eyedness and aura, as certainly did many others. His music seems much more about capturing the complexity of his subjective responses to those 'other things' and how they can be incorporated for the purposes of widening and enriching the expressive possibilities of his musical language.

Bryn says
 My first experience of Brahms was the four symphonies conducted by Herbert von Karajan. I'm not sure what school of conducting he belonged to, but to me those performances were " heavy, pompous, over-stated ", and that put me off Brahms for a while. I've subsequently heard a performance of the 2nd which was completely different, much more musical and livelier, but I do worry that I'll never appreciate the first.