For Brahms, holidays did not just mean a nice break; they constituted important or even essential periods of composition. This is best seen through the example of his First Symphony Op. 68: as is well known, it had its roots in a birthday greeting of 12 September 1868 to Clara Schumann, in which Brahms notated an alphorn call he allegedly heard during a walk from Grindelwald to Lauterbrunnen. He then worked on the symphony in summer 1874 in Rüschlikon (near Zurich) and in 1876 in Sassnitz on the island of Rügen where he enjoyed the landscape. As he wrote to his publisher Fritz Simrock, the Symphony ‘was dangling’ from the Wissower Klinken cliffs, the famous chalk formations on the east coast of the island. The manuscript was finally completed in September 1876 in Lichtenthal, near the fashionable spa town of Baden-Baden, where the composer often stayed.