Having successfully completed his First Symphony after a 15-year struggle, Brahms began composing his Second almost immediately. His friend, the scholar Philipp Spitta, noted that ‘the first two symphonies form a contrasted imaginative pair entirely characteristic of the composer, and they must be regarded as stemming from a single deeply hidden root’. The Third Symphony, one of Brahms’s most poetic and evocative works, was hailed by the critic Eduard Hanslick as ‘artistically the most perfect … equal to the best of Brahms’s works … a feast for the music-lover and musician’.