At the end of his post, he talked about his ideas relating the great choral motet “Warum?” to Brahms’ Fourth Symphony:
By the way, Brahms’s great motet “Warum?” is a setting of the anguished question from the Book of Job: “Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life to the bitter in soul?” The beginning of God’s response serves as the epigraph to The Tree of Life: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” I’ve long had the feeling — entirelyunsubstantiated by biographical evidence — that the finale of the Brahms Fourth is a representation of the same passage. I take up that idea in the last chapter of my book Listen to This.
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