The mystery of Modern dissonance

The story goes that when the twenty-year old Brahms visited Liszt in Weimar in 1853, Liszt effortlessly sight-read the younger man's piano Sonata in C major (a work of considerable technical difficulty). Brahms was astounded by this feat of consummate musicianship. However, when Liszt then played his own, as yet unpublished, B minor Sonata, Brahms fell asleep. Liszt probably understood that the young composer was tired after his long journey, and of course the story may be apocryphal, but nevertheless the fact that they never met again may be read as a metaphor for a divergence of musical tendencies that came to characterise nineteenth-century high art music. Some describe this as ‘the war of the Romantics’, a bitter dispute between the New German School (principal figures, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner) and traditionalists, such as Brahms, whose work was deemed oldfashioned. It was a spat that embroiled the whole of musical Europe.