When in 1900 the famous Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick labelled Mahler, Strauss and Wolf together as the ‘Musical Secession’, he could hardly have found a less congenial group of bedfellows. Wolf thought Strauss's music affected madness, Mahler hated Wolf's songs for their emphasis on ‘de-cla-ma-tion’, while Strauss and Mahler respected each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. One might say that Hanslick was revealing his ignorance of the complexity of post-Wagnerian movements and relying on the simplest of cultural distinctions. For it is true that Mahler, Strauss and Wolf can be quickly identified as those who believed in the artist as revolutionary hero – as against artists who placed emphasis on respect for the past. If Hanslick still defined artistic ‘secession’ in 1900 as leaving behind any commonly agreed criteria of beauty, demanding the freedom to establish one's own standards of truth and value, then all three would be ‘secessionists’ without question. But then so would be almost every other well-known Austro-German composer of the late nineteenth century, except perhaps for the notable case of Brahms. Brahms's music certainly continued to focus on the power of Classical forms and technique; but as Schoenberg pointed out in his essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’ this direct continuity with the past was a complex and individual achievement. In Austria or Germany in the late nineteenth century any norms of musical expectation were more easily filtered through Wagner than Brahms, but with confusing consequences, for Wagner's example tended to set all notions of tradition, belonging and secession on their heads.