Back, Keri.
When it came to ambition, Beethoven was no slouch himself. Even though he could not hear a lot of what was going on, he had a very powerful sense of intuition, and early on got wind of that Brahms kid who was trying to out-Beethoven Beethoven.  Two examples of Beethoven's character: In the  famous Ode to Joy that caps his monumental Ninth Symphony, the chorus enters famously in the last movement, singing, "Freude" (German, for joy for idiots reading who did not know that.) In the original manuscript, which Vikopedia somehow got hold of, Beethoven wanted the entrance word to be "Ludvig," but was talked out of it when his publisher upped his advance, helping out an artist, which as we all know, is what publishers do to our very day. The other thing Vikopedia found out was that most of Beethoven's melodies, weren't even his own but were Schubert's, who had just died when Beethoven was coming into his own (my timing may be a bit off here), but he stole some of his best melodies including the infamous Fur Elise, which again, he tried to call Fur Ludwig, but was bribed out of. He dumped the originals in a carton in his basement where they were not found for decades by Mendelsohn, who complained for the rest of his life to his analyst, the young Freud, that Beethoven was trying to kill him.

But what has all this to do with Brahms? Brahms was a notoriously slow writer, mostly because he had never fully mastered the scales and with each note had to go through "every good boy does fine" or "face." That's why it took him decades to release his first symphony, not because of artistic struggle. It is also rumored that Beethoven tried to kill Brahms by shooting him from one of the turrets of a castle with a gun given him by Napoleon who secretly bent it to not shoot straight when he took his name off the Eroica. The warning was not lost on Brahms, especially because the premier of his his first symphony in Heidelstrasenbergenluffthansa was on a night when Beethoven's Fifth was being performed in an adjacent hall, and the Fifth was already the monster in popularity it is today. Beethoven, of course, got the big hall and Brahms one so small the gargantuan (for that time) orchestra could hardly fit on the stage, the violins having to occupy the first row it was so tight. The performance seemed to be going well. Brahms was in the lobby chewing a cigar as was his wont when all of a sudden a piercing scream rang out. It seems that at one of the most tender moments of the adagio the first violinist, unaware of exactly how tight the quarters were stuck her bow in and extracted the eye of on eight-year-old Clara Van Veisenthallerbachanalia whose name, according to Vikopedia, is not well known today because Brahms had to pay her the entire royalties for the performance, which also explains why his next three symphonies followed so quickly, one after the other. When Beethoven, basking in the glory of the reception of his Fifth at the adjacent hall, heard the scream, he smiled. He knew the architect of the hall where the Brahms were being performed and had the score. He was good friends with the architect, who later went on to build the Eiffel Tower, which he tried to call the Ludwig Tower but could not get it through. At any rate,the seats were adjusted just a tiny bit so that when that note came some part of someone's facial anatomy was going to get to know it intimately. But an 8 year old girl? Even for Beethoven, this was excessive and for the rest of her life, Clara received one percent of the royalties for Fur Elise, a not insonsiderable amount, for her medical expenses. There are also rumors about Beethoven and her having an affair when she hit her teen=age years, but Vikopedia discovered that these were simply fabricated by Brahms and there was no truth to them whatsoever.