Everyone in town had heard the rumor, but for most of the audience it was the first confirmation. Brahms was dying, they could see it all over him. He had risen to acknowledge the applause after each movement of this his last symphony, and everyone had looked up with a shudder, and the grieving had built through the course of the stark, sorrowful work until this explosion at the end. Brahms stood in the box leaning on the balustrade with tears pouring down his face. For once he did not try to hide them.[...]
By the night of his last concert in the Musikverein, history appeared already to have rushed past Brahms and left him at once victorious and irrelevant, stranded on his lonely promontory. In that year approaching the last turn of century before the millennium, Europe was falling toward unimaginable catastrophe, and the arts toward the corollary of Romanticism: the ferment and fever called Modernism. Brahms saw it coming. And he could not believe that the triumphs he had experienced in his lifetime could endure, that his work could find a place in a such a world. He feared that the future would sweep away his public and his art, leaving him little more than a footnote in history. Perhaps that too lay behind his tears at the Musikverein on March 7, 1897, when with the Fourth Symphony-his last testament to the highest level of idealism and craft, and to something in the direction of despair-Brahms heard his music played in public for the last time.
Jan Swafford- Johannes Brahms, A Biography