1. Allegro con brio. 2. Andante. 3. Poco allegretto. 4. Allegro Many annotators of Brahms's music have tried to give a literary interpretation of the dramatic and poetic ideas behind the Third Symphony. Richter called it Brahms's ' Eroica ' Symphony, which is an interpretation that has provided several distinguished writers with a romantic theme to develop with varying ingenuity. Curiously enough, if we accept Beethoven's ' Eroica ' Symphony as the norm of the heroic in music we find very little of its character in Brahms's Third Symphony. except perhaps in the very powerful finale.
R. H. Schlauffer , the American biographer and critic of Brahms, points out that if this symphony must be given a label, the most apt would be Portrait '. 'This work', he says, ' might be taken as a portrait in tones of a healthy, strong, turbulent, tender, indomitable, kindly, aggressive, ironic, tempestuous, self-distrustful, incisive, concentrated, modest, fiery, rude, genial man-a person, in fact, just like the one who created it.'
Brahms was all these things ; like most of us he was a mass of contradictions. In short, he expressed in this symphony his own personality and nothing more.