Doctor Brahms indulges in some academic frivolity
‘Artis musicae severioris in Germania nunc princeps’ (‘The most famous living German composer of serious music’). That is the citation which accompanied the honorary doctoral degree awarded to Johannes Brahms by the University of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) at a ceremony in the city on 4 January 1881 – a form of words which, incidentally, seriously irritated Brahms’s great contemporary
