If you had been in Vienna on today’s date in 1897, you could have witnessed a civic outpouring of affection and respect as the coffin bearing the remains of Johannes Brahms processed to that city’s Central Cemetery. One eye-witness was the German-born British musician Sir George Henschel, who was a friend of the late composer.

He tells us the funeral procession was led by black-garbed riders on horseback, followed by the bier bearing Brahms’s coffin surrounded by many other carts overflowing with floral bouquets, including two immense floral wreaths, one from the city of Hamburg, where Brahms was born, another from the city of Vienna, where he died.

Let’s let Henschel himself describe what happened next:

“The sun, which had come out gloriously by that time, shone, as it were on a gigantic, moving garden… Before the building of the Society of the Friends of Music, the procession halted. The doors and pillars were draped in black cloth. On either side of the portal, from metal bowls, candelabras were flickering with a subdued, mystical light. From underneath a canopy the SingVerein [Chorale], which had often sung under the inspiring direction of the master, now sang his own beautiful part-song, ‘Farewell,’ Op. 93a, no. 4.

“As the lovely strains rang out into the vernal air, there could be heard from the neighboring trees the merry twittering of birds, whose song seemed to have been kindled by the approach of spring.”