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Brahms and Reményi began playing and socializing with the violinist’s circle of Hungarian exiles. There were trips to Winsen for pleasant evenings of playing at the Giesemanns’. Already a devotee of folk music in general, Brahms responded enthusiastically to the czardas and other styles that made up the alla Zingarese (in the gypsy style) repertoire. Still, there was little more to their relations than playing chamber music, a few shared interests, some sociable times in city and country. At that point, Reményi was likely just another contact for Johannes, who had no discernible plans for his career and little time for friends. The fun ended in early 1851, when rumors of an arrest warrant put Reményi on a boat to America.

In March 1850, there was a ripple of excitement in Hamburg when composer Robert Schumann arrived for concerts with his wife, Clara Schumann née Wieck (as she took pains to note on her programs). Since Clara was far more celebrated than her husband the excitement had largely to do with her presence, especially since Madame Schumann gave two concerts with adored soprano Jenny Lind, “the Swedish nightingale.” Robert Schumann conducted the Philharmonic in the overture to his opera Genoveva, about to be premiered in Leipzig; on the concert his wife soloed in his A Minor Piano Concerto. Applause was scant for his pieces, but Schumann was used to that.41

Brahms may have skipped the concerts, but prodded by Luise Japha he bundled up some of his compositions and sent them to Schumann at the hotel, hoping for comment and a meeting. Schumann, busy with his concert and with the question of whether to accept a position as music director in Düsseldorf, did not have time to examine a parcel of music from an unknown youth. Brahms was disgusted to receive the package back unopened. The resentment he felt toward Schumann over that rebuff must have increased when in the autumn of 1852 Luise, the closest of his few friends, told him that she was moving to Düsseldorf to study with the Schumanns—piano with Clara, composition with Robert. “Don’t go!” Brahms entreated Luise. “You’re the only one here who takes any interest in me!”42

There is no record of what music Brahms sent Schumann. He had been writing no one knows how many pieces, in no one knows what genres. Rumors survive of sonatas for one and two pianos, string quartets, fantasias and variations, dozens of songs. A few of his instrumental pieces he aired under the name Karl Würth, yet another pseudonym. Finally in 1851 he produced the first two works he would be willing to preserve and to publish with his name on them—the demonic E Minor Scherzo and a short song on Uhland’s “Heimkehr.” The latter is marked Allegro agitato; its wandering tempos and breathless dynamics lead to a final overwrought peroration on “World, don’t perish; sky, don’t fall, until I’m with the girl I love!” The E Minor Scherzo and a few other piano pieces and songs were soon to drop the jaws of leading musicians in Europe. Brahms played the scherzo privately in February 1851, for visiting composer Henri Charles Litolff.43 (Next year, probably for the money, Brahms arranged a Litolff overture for piano and “Physharmonica,” a predecessor to the modern harmonium.44)

Everything was scattered, inconclusive. The month after Litolff heard the E Minor Scherzo, Brahms briefly visited the Giesemanns and wrote a “Farewell to Winsen” for the men’s choir, another piece later suppressed. In July there was a bit of glory when he appeared with Danish composer Niels Gade, an old friend of Robert Schumann’s (who wrote a piece whose theme begins with the notes G-A-D-E). To this private concert Brahms contributed two of his “Karl Würth” pieces, a piano trio and a cello and piano duo, both later destroyed. By then he had built up a small but significant collection of masks, named Young Kreisler, G. W. Marks, Karl Würth. After that would come another: Werther.

IF THE STORY of Brahms’s life around the beginning of the new decade seems shadowy and aimless, surely