In the per­ma­nent con­flict with the forces of fate the com­poser gradu­ally and dis­creetly pre­pares his lis­tener to de­sire more and more per­sonal in­de­pend­ence from the forces of fate. Fi­nally, the mu­si­cal crea­tor guides his lis­tener into the world of the free, into the realms of those great men who stand above fate.

And so, some­one who strug­gles with the in­flu­ences of the en­vi­ron­ment in the rou­tine of his day-to-day life, turns into some­one who has real­ized and ex­peri­enced within him­self that it is pos­si­ble to per­son­ally mas­ter the pow­ers of one’s fate.
A com­poser par­ticu­larly suc­cess­ful in this mu­si­cal proc­ess of know­ing, of man con­quering the forces of fate, is Beethoven – and as his heir: Brahms.

In their time, these two great mu­si­cal poets had clearly iden­ti­fied the mass move­ment of the in­di­vid­ual capitulating to en­vi­ron­men­tal, so­cial, and eco­logi­cal in­flu­ences – a fa­tal trend which grew from the reli­gious glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of suf­fer­ing.
In their mu­sic, they out­lined ways and means of reso­lutely fight­ing and glo­ri­ously win­ning over such self-de­struc­tive, pessimistic at­ti­tudes to­wards life, and their sym­pho­nies are shin­ing tokens of this noble hu­man re­spon­si­bil­ity be­ing car­ried out.

While Mozart, for ex­ample, ex­pands the love of life of the lis­tener to his per­sonal ex­peri­ence of im­mor­tal­ity, Beethoven and Brahms reach the same high goal by in­di­vidu­ally con­quering fate. Thus, they point out a way which, at their time and to the day, is re­garded as the way of the reso­lute ac­tion – the war­rior’s way to the per­sonal re­ali­za­tion of free­dom.

While Mozart dances with his lis­tener on light feet through the ranks of the forces of fate and fi­nally tran­scends the limits of fate, Beethoven and Brahms teach the lis­tener to fight fate, but to fi­nally rec­og­nize it as a fully auto­no­mous, co­op­er­at­ing power, and to make it a friend.

And this per­sonal, sys­tem­atic ac­cep­tance of the forces of fate, of those in­di­vid­ual, so­cial and eco­logi­cal in­flu­ences of the en­vi­ron­ment pressing on us, se­cures the lis­tener the un­hin­dered course through the con­fu­sion of his time, and it teaches him to over­come fate: to tran­scend it – teaches him the very per­sonal friend­ship with the mighty fate.