Brahms

At twenty he was announced to all of Europe by Schumann in an article in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and spent the rest of his life carrying the label 'Beethoven's heir'. The First Symphony took him twenty-one years; he was forty-three at the premiere. When someone pointed out that the finale's theme resembles the Ode to Joy, he replied that any fool could see that.

He was the nineteenth century's most conservative modernist: classical forms held rigidly in place, and something extremely complicated going on inside them. That is the argument of Schoenberg's 1933 essay 'Brahms the Progressive' — his handling of motifs is more radical than anything the self-declared avant-garde was doing. The four late clarinet works are what is left after he puts every kind of rhetoric down, and they are worth an evening on their own.