The tour began at Winsen, then came Cella.  Here a curious thing happened.  The piano proved to be a half tone below pitch, but Brahms was equal to the dilemma.  Requesting Remenyi to tune his violin a half tone higher, making it a whole tone above the piano, he then, at sight, transposed the Beethoven Sonata they were to play.  It was really a great feat, but Johannes performed it as though it were an every day affair.

The next place was Luneburg and there the young musician had such success that a second concert was at once announced.  Two were next given at Hildesheim.  Then came Leipsic, Hanover and after that Weimer, where Franz Liszt and his retinue of famous pupils held court.  Here Johannes became acquainted with Raff, Klindworth, Mason, Pruekner and other well-known musicians.

By this time his relations with Remenyi had become somewhat irksome and strained and he decided to break off this connection.  One morning he suddenly left Weimar, and traveled to Goettingen.  There he met Joseph Joachim, whom he had long wished to know, and who was the reigning violinist of his time.  Without any announcement, Johannes walked in on the great artist, and they became fast friends almost at once.  Joachim had never known what it was to struggle; he had had success from the very start; life had been one long triumph, whereas Johannes had come from obscurity and had been reared in privation.  At this time Johannes was a fresh faced boy, with long fair hair and deep earnest blue eyes.  Wuellner, the distinguished musician of Cologne, thus describes him:  “Brahms, at twenty, was a slender youth, with long blond hair and a veritable St. John’s head, from whose eyes shone energy and spirit.”

Johannes was at this time deeply engaged on his piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 5.  He had already written two other piano sonatas, as yet little known.  The Op. 5, is now constantly heard in concert rooms, played by the greatest artists of our time.

In disposition Hannes was kindly and sincere; as a youth merry and gay.  A friend in Duesseldorf, where he now spent four weeks, thus describes him: 

“He was a most unusual looking young musician, hardly more than a boy, in his short summer coat, with his high-pitched voice and long fair hair.  Especially fine was his energetic, characteristic mouth, and his earnest, deep gaze.  His constitution was thoroughly healthy; the most strenuous mental exercise hardly fatigued him and he could go to sleep at any hour of the day he pleased.  He was apt to be full of pranks, too.  At the piano he dominated by his characteristic, powerful, and when necessary, extraordinarily tender playing.”  Schumann, whom he now came to know in Duesseldorf, called him the “young eagle—­one of the elect.”  In fact Schumann, in his musical journal, praised the young musician most highly.  And his kindness did not stop there.  He wrote to Hannes’ father, Jakob Brahms, in Hamburg, commending in glowing