“Where to go for summer vacation?” That’s always been the question of any city-dweller fortunate enough to be able to escape to somewhere cool and green, with perhaps an ocean beach or at least a lake nearby.

In the summers of 1877 and 1878, Johannes Brahms abandoned urban Vienna for the rural Austrian district known as Carinthia and specifically the small town of Pörtschach on Lake Worth. Even today, this is prime vacation territory, with rolling green hills sporting dark pine trees, a scattering of bright blue lakes, and the snow-capped Alps along the horizon. And the wildflowers have to be seen to be believed. We can’t SHOW you all these pictures, but Johannes Brahms managed to capture the sound and sense of the place in much of his Second Symphony and his Violin Concerto—two works composed during his summer holidays on Lake Worth.

In Carinthia, said Brahms, the melodies are so abundant that one had to be careful not to step on them. There just might be something in that, at least with respect to great Violin Concertos. In July of 1935, 57 years after Brahms wrote his Concerto in Pörtschach, the Viennese composer Alban Berg would finish his Violin Concerto in the same town, on the opposite shore of Lake Worth from where Brahms stayed during his summer vacations. Berg’s Concerto even includes a quote from a risqué Carinthian folksong.