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that is how he perceived it himself as he approached adulthood. His artistic work was pulling together remarkably well, but otherwise he had no very good idea how he was going to earn a living. Doing it with composition was of course unimaginable, except maybe by means of the “G. W. Marks” species of parlor music. Few composers outside Beethoven, Rossini, and a few others had survived entirely on the proceeds of serious composing. At the same time Johannes was not interested in making a name as a virtuoso, and conversely could not have wanted to stay at the kind of hackwork he had been composing. Full-time piano teaching would surely have horrified him as well.

So he lived an aimless existence with his family. Around 1852 the situation appeared on the verge of becoming even shabbier. After long and anxious hesitation, his mother revealed to Johannes that Johann Jakob had declared himself fed up with the women in his family and was thinking of moving out of the house. When his mother told him, Johannes burst into tears.45 Probably owing in part to his entreaties the crisis receded, but the wretched possibility of a broken family lay on his mind from then on. If it happened, there would be no question of Johannes’s siding exclusively with his mother and sister. Among his driving motivations had become his desire to show his father that he could amount to something—on his own terms. But what were his terms?

Otherwise, on the surface 1852 continued about the same as the previous year, but Brahms’s creative work was burgeoning. That year he completed more songs that would appear in his first collections of lieder. (Opus 6, mostly from 1852, is dedicated to Luise Japha and her artist sister Minna.) In February came the poignant variations on the folk song “Verstohlen geht der Mond auf” that would serve as the slow movement of Opus 1, the C Major Piano Sonata. In November, he completed the first sonata he would publish under his own name, the F# Minor, Opus 2.

In January 1853, Brahms composed the haunting, impetuous song “Liebestreu,” placed first in his published lieder and one of the most striking of his life. The ideas were coming fast now, all of them emotionally heated, Romantic, but he made them tight in the telling. Brahms had already achieved a music singular in personality, yet different from what he would be writing a decade later, when life had beaten the youth and impetuousness out of him. Around March 1853 came the remaining movements of the C Major Piano Sonata and the second and fourth of the rhapsodic F Minor Piano Sonata, Opus 5. Both manuscripts are signed “Joh. Kreisler, Junior.” By then he had written the bulk of the works that were to become his astonishing first six opus numbers.

Back from America and Paris, Eduard Reményi showed up in Hamburg again in December 1852, ready to present more concerts. He and Brahms picked up their playing and their friendship (friendships with Brahms were generally carried on in large part by music-making). At some point it was suggested that they do a concert in Winsen, where they had often visited Hungarian friends and the Giesemanns. The concert came off on April 20, the program Beethoven’s C Minor Violin Sonata, a virtuosic Vieuxtemps Violin Concerto in piano-violin arrangement, and a group of Reményi’s trademark Hungarian melodies. Sitting proudly in the audience for the concert were the Giesemanns and their friends. The duo played again next day in Hoopte, in the schoolroom of Brahms’s old mentor Alwin Schröder. Though it all went well, for Johannes the performances seemed no more auspicious than earlier ones, none of which had caused much stir outside the circle of his friends and family.

At some point Brahms and Reményi decided to keep going, to make a little tour of it. Why not? Biographer Max Kalbeck surmises that “spring and Wanderlust” inspired the two, which is as likely as anything.46 Probably for Reményi it was something to kill time, fish for contacts; they could visit Reményi’s school friend and fellow Hungarian patriot Josef Joachim in Hanover. For Johannes,