In 1853, Robert Schumann wrote in the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik that Brahms was the saviour of music and he was like "Minerva sprung fully formed from  the head of Cronos" or some other nonsense like that.  The irony in all this was that Brahms looked "like a seven year old girl!" as one roommate has noted, and so I had
to draw this cartoon when the Schumann article was mentioned in class.
Then Brahms eventually turned into Santa Claus. [There was a picture circulating around the net that had a santa cap on the head of old fat beared Brahms = Santa.] I attempted to capture the transformation.
   Brahms's arch-rival Richard Wagner was apparently an antivivisectionist.  (This I feel the need to reference, since I was pretty incredulous myself.  But I read it in an article in The Wagner Compendium, ed. Barry Millington, London: Schirmer Books, 1992.) Anyway: Supposedly (back to the land of speculation!) Wagner started the rumor that Brahms was a cat killer and that he had recovered a Bohemian sparrow hunting bow or something from his friend Dvorak and used this to lean out of his apartment window and shoot stray cats, reel them in, AND finally incorporate their dying meows into his chamber music.  I suppose this is a pretty heavy attack coming from an animal lover!   (But anyone who hears Brahms's chamber music will realize it sounds a lot less like the screeching of tortured cats than SOME Valkyries we know...)
   I was inspired, at any rate..
Brahms (1833-1897)
How much of this nonsense did you bring into this world?
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Another Wait! I can explain is in line here...
Wagner neglected to mention (or didn't know) that Brahms  lived on the 4th floor, however - cat hunting in this way would have been quite difficult!