388 Thomas Quigley ranging, including physicians like Theodor Billroth and Theodor Wilhelm Engel-mann; music historians like Philipp Spitta, and Gustav Nottebohm; and philologist Gustav Wendt. Brahms also had a deep interest in current affairs and this extended beyond politics to all aspects of the modern world of science and technology. Such interest was very strong in the Wien of Brahms’s day, and reflected the widespread and pervasive late nineteenth-century fascination with scientific progress, and science and technology. Brahms owned copies of pioneering medical texts of both Billroth and Engelmann; he would observe Billroth’s pioneering surgery at the Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Wien. And the world of scientific inventions earned his attention as well, progress in the name of science being of great personal interest to him.32 While he certainly welcomed innovations in the area of music, e.g. in the design and manufacture of pianos, Brahms’s range of interests was very broad. J. V. Widmann describes Brahms’s perspective thus:Even the smallest discovery, every improvement in any sort of gadget for domestic use; in short, every sign of human reflection, if it was accompanied by practical success, delighted him thoroughly. Nothing escaped his notice […] if it was something new, in which progress could be discerned. Brahms, Widmann continues, felt lucky that he lived in the age of great discoveries; he couldn’t praise enough the electric light, Edison’s phonograph and the like.33 Brahms’s own use of the train falls into three categories: – travel to his holiday destinations, – for his work as a musician, and for – general travel. Brahms’s summer holidays were very regular and he was very comfortable frequenting the same destination year after year — in Austria this manifested itself in stays in both Pörtschach (late 1870s) and Mürzzuschlag (1880s). Many of his holiday destinations were well known gathering places for intellectuals, artists and high society in Nineteenth-Century Europe, e.g. Baden-Baden and Wiesbaden in Germany, Bad Ischl in Austria, but he also enjoyed taking longer travelling trips in Switzerland (late 1860s and late 1880s) and he made eight lengthy trips to Italy by train between 1878 and 1893 in the company of various friends and colleagues. The Italian trips were always made in April and May. He also often made day trips, for example he writes in 1869 from Wien to his family in Hamburg, of going to the Semmering for the day.34 bliothek von Johannes Brahms. Bücher- und Musikalienverzeichniss (= Schriftenreihe zur Musik), Hamburg 1974. 32 Musgrave: p. 171—73 (see Note 4).33 Botstein: p. 4 (see Note 19); see also the article George S. Bozarth and Stephen H. Brady: The Pianos of Johannes Brahms, p. 73—93 in: Brahms and His World (2009) (see Note 19); Widmann. Johannes Brahms in Erinnerungen (1898) as quoted in translation in Botstein: p. 3, 4. 34 Conclusions based on my review of trips as described in Geiringer (see Note 23). For an indepth des -