Eduard Hanslick's reviews of the works of Johannes Brahms span from 1862, when he announced “the appearance before the Viennese public of this blond, St. John visage of a composer,” to the year of Hanslick's death, 1904. Composer and critic struck up a close and lifelong friendship following their meeting in 1862, a friendship they shared with the Austrian surgeon and amateur musician Theodor Billroth—the three being on intimate du terms and forming the “closest musical threesome.” Hanslick was the music correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, Austria's leading liberal daily newspaper. It was here that he published his abundant and multifarious writings on Brahms. Not only are Hanslick's Brahms reviews musically perceptive and insightful, they can also be understood as a cultural commentary on the musical world of Vienna in the late nineteenth century, and they illuminate the cultural, religious, and political context in which Brahms's works were composed and received.