With the term protector, one often imagines a person who sees as his task to protect another while a protégé is pr. definition one that is protected. In music history, there are many examples of composers who have held their protective hand over other composer colleagues to help them up and become known, get their careers started and so on.

We have found some examples of such role distributions: Robert Schumann as a protector of Johannes Brahms who in turn protected Alexander von Zemlinsky. The result was a lot of nice music!