Piano Trio No. 1 in B, Op. 8, Piano Trio No. 2 in C, Op. 87

For years, Brahms was known as a composer with a traditional bent, who had little time for progressive contemporaries such as Wagner and Liszt. Yet in his essay Brahms the Progressive, dating from 1933, Schönberg took a surprisingly different position. He spoke highly of Brahms as an innovator for various reasons: for his audacity in choosing asymmetrically structured phrases, for his systematic construction of the compositions and for the ingenious manner in which he managed to re-use a motif or theme in a constantly different form (he called the technique: ‘developing variation’).