In 1853 Robert Schumann predicted that Brahms would be the next great German symphonist, and he was right. By 1883 the 19th-century conductor Hans von Bülow famously linked the name of Brahms with those of Bach and Beethoven—the “Three B’s”—making him the culmination of two centuries of Teutonic music history. These works are also the culmination of Brahms’s own symphonic compositions, his last two large-scale works for orchestra, which astonished audiences and critics of his time for their highly innovative structure and instrumentation.