Antony Beaumont notes that Busoni wrote virtually no chamber music after 1898 and no songs between 1886 and 1918, commenting that this was "part of the process of freeing himself from his Leipzig background ... worlds of middle-class respectability in which he was not at home, and [in which the shadows of Schumann, Brahms and Wolf loomed too large." The first decade of the 20th century is described by Brendel as being for Busoni "a creative pause" after which he "finally gained an artistic profile of his own" as opposed to the "easy routine which had kept his entire earlier production on the tracks of eclecticism".