One of his friends said, of meetings in Brahms’ rooms at night, when his boon companions reveled in music:  “And how Brahms loved the great masters!  How he played Haydn and Mozart!  With what beauty of interpretation and delicate shading of tone.  And then his transposing!” Indeed Johann thought nothing of taking up a new composition and playing it in any key, without a mistake.  His score reading was marvelous.  Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, all seemed to flow naturally from under his fingers.

The post in Detmold only required Brahms’ presence a part of the year, but he was engaged for a term of years.  The other half of the year was spent in Hamburg, where he resumed his activities of composing and teaching.  The summer after his first winter in Detmold was spent in Goettingen with warm friends.  Clara Schumann was there with her children, and Johann was always one of the family—­as a son to her.  He was a famous playfellow for the children, too.  About this time he wrote a book of charming Children’s Folk Songs, dedicated to the children of Robert and Clara Schumann.  Johann was occupied with his Piano Concerto in D minor.  His method of working was somewhat like Beethoven’s, as he put down his ideas in notebooks.  Later on he formed the habit of keeping several compositions going at once.

The prelude to Johann’s artistic life was successfully completed.  Then came a period of quiet study and inward growth.  A deeper activity was to succeed.  It opened early in the year 1859, when the young musician traveled to Hanover and Leipsic, bringing out his Concerto in D minor.  He performed it in the first named city, while Joachim conducted the orchestra.  It was said the work “with all its serious striving, its rejection of the trivial, its skilled instrumentation, seemed difficult to understand; but the pianist was considered not merely a virtuoso but a great artist of piano playing.”

The composer had now to hurry to Leipsic, as he was to play with the famous Gewandhaus orchestra.  How would Leipsic behave towards this new and serious music?  Johann was a dreamer, inexperienced in the ways of the world; he was an idealist—­in short, a genius gifted with an “imagination, profound, original and romantic.”  The day after the concert he wrote Joachim he had made a brilliant and decided failure.  However he was not a whit discouraged by the apathy of the Leipsigers toward his new work.  He wrote:  “The Concerto will please some day, when I have made some improvements, and a second shall sound quite different.”

It has taken more than half a century to establish the favor of the Concerto, which still continues on upward wing.  The writer heard the composer play this Concerto in Berlin, toward the end of his life.  He made an unforgettable figure, as he sat at the piano with his long hair and beard, turning to gray; and while his technic was not of the virtuoso type, he created a powerful impression by his vivid interpretation.