Symphony no. 3 in F major, op. 90

The Third Symphony was written in the summer of 1883 at Wiesbaden and is dedicated to Hans von Bülow, the conductor who had been campaigning for Brahms's music and who coined the formula of the three Bs. Hans Richter conducted the premiere in Vienna on 2 December 1883, where the audience divided sharply — some applauded, others whistled, in the aftermath of Wagner's death that January. The work reverses the path of the First: it moves from a broad major opening towards a minor finale and then subsides, a rare direction in nineteenth-century symphonies.