If the “Deutsches Requiem" opened the eyes of German music-lovers, it was assuredly the symphony in C minor that awakened English ears to a just and worthy estimate of the gifts of the Hamburg composer. The impression created at Cambridge was to spread within a few years over the entire kingdom. “What a masterpiece for a first symphony!" exclaimed Garcia, as we listened to the rehearsal by the Cambridge University Musical Society under Villiers Stanford. What a masterpiece indeed! And what patience for such a musician to have waited before writing it until he was forty-three years old and could inscribe “Op. 68” upon the score of his symphony No. 1! Of course we all smiled when the opening theme of the finale suggested that unmistakable resemblance to the corresponding subject in the last movement of Beethoven's “Ninth”, which Brahms always protested he could not perceive. But the trifling similarity mattered naught unless to lend the new work a greater charm; for Brahms was nothing if not original, and the soul of honesty itself.