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cushions, plush chairs and poufs, satin breeches with matching fur-lined jackets and Oriental slippers, reams of silk and velvet wall hangings, and silk dressing gowns by the dozen.38 (At the time he ordered these luxuries he was completely broke.) In the cafés of Vienna the publication of the letters elicited the amusement Spitzer had hoped for. It was as if Wagner had satirized himself better than anyone else could. Since Spitzer was one of Brahms’s circle, Wagner was convinced that Brahms had put the satirist up to publishing the letters. Well, Wagner may have been right—though that sort of trick was more Wagner’s style than Brahms’s. In any case, it put relations between the two men back on their normally bad terms.

Through an admirer Brahms later came into possession of the letters to the milliner and liked to give dramatic readings of them, with great gusto, to his friends. Wagner was never likely to become reconciled to Brahms anyway; contempt for rivals was axiomatic with him. Not long before, his young disciple Friedrich Nietzsche had undergone a spasm of Brahms-fervor, mainly over the Triumphlied. When the philosopher went so far as to press the piece on his mentor, a tragicomic scene ensued. As Wagner mockingly recalled it:

When I entered his room at the hotel I saw a suspicious-looking little red book, some songlet of triumph or of destiny by Brahms, with which [Nietzsche] made ready to attack me. But I was not going to have any of it. Towards evening the Professor came to Wahnfried [Wagner’s palace at Bayreuth] and behold, he had the accursed red book under his arm. He now had a mind to put it on the piano desk and play it to me.… At last I became violent.… I was rude and—heaven knows how—Nietzsche was thrown out.

It is said that on this occasion the philosopher crowed to Wagner, “Look, that is absolute music, yes, absolute music!” (Nietzsche owned a well-thumbed copy of Hanslick’s On Beauty in Music, which Wagner had denounced as written “in the interest of music-Jewry.”) Nietzsche’s short-lived passion for Brahms and his futile attempt to bring the two composers into détente did perhaps mark a stage of the disciple’s apostasy, as Wagner obviously suspected. But the course of this odd triangle would continue to run unpredictably in the next years.

NOW THAT HE WAS NO LONGER tied to the Gesellschaft, Brahms’s winter performing schedule actually accelerated. January 1876 saw a tour of Holland that enhanced his already considerable prestige there. At the end of a deliriously applauded program in Utrecht featuring his performance of the D Minor Concerto, there was a ceremony emblematic of the time: two beautiful girls marched to the platform carrying cushions bearing wreaths, one decked with ribbons in Austria’s black and gold, the other with Dutch red, white, and blue. With embarrassment and pleasure Brahms brandished the wreaths to the cheering throngs.

In Utrecht he stayed with the family of Professor Wilhelm Engelmann—like Billroth a music-loving physician—and his pianist wife Emma. To Engelmann went the dedication of the B Major String Quartet. Fellow quartet dedicatee Billroth revealed much of his feeling for art when he wrote Engelmann: “I am afraid these dedications will keep our names in memory longer than the best work we have done; for us not very complimentary, but beautiful for humanity, which, with the correct instinct, considers art more immortal than science.”39

After Holland, Brahms toured in Germany, enjoying the usual interludes of sociable dining and drinking. From an evening in Koblenz at the house of Geheimrath Wegeler came a famous anecdote when the host presented the company a prized bottle with the conceit, “What Brahms is among composers, so is this Rauenthaler among wines!” Instantly Brahms’s voice was heard: “Ah, well let’s have a bottle of Bach, then.” After a matinee in which he performed with some Frankfurt musicians, the Princess of Hesse-Barchfeld presented Brahms with a silver laurel wreath, each leaf engraved with the title of one of his works. He was tickled to find the