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dispensed his Magyar and Zigeuner tunes. Brahms worked out his own accompaniments for the pieces and probably never wrote them down. This repertoire would be of great consequence to him. From Reményi and later from Joachim, he absorbed not only the style but the spirit of “Hungarian” folk music. Unlike these two colleagues, however, Brahms took no interest in the Hungarian nationalism that underlay their devotion to the music. There is no record of his saying anything about Hungary’s struggle to free itself of Austria. He seems to have been indifferent to other cultures and to Romantic nationalism generally (as distinct from German patriotism). Likely Brahms shared that indifference with many enthusiasts of the gypsy style: he simply liked the music.

In those days people sat in smoky cafés and listened to tawny and exotic gypsy bands in much the same spirit with which another generation would sit in clubs listening to black men playing jazz. In fact, the entire tradition of a lower-caste popular music percolating into more “sophisticated” styles began with gypsy music.5 As jazz would give later concert composers fresh ideas, so did gypsy music inspire composers from Haydn and Schubert to Brahms and Joachim with new tonal colors, new kinds of expression with kaleidoscopic shifts from slow and soulful to fast and fiery, and an emancipation from the rhythmic tyranny of unbending beat and bar line. In his Zigeuner music and out of it, Brahms would make steady use of lessons he learned from the style. His experience with it helped counter his conventional training and conservative instincts.

So with Reményi as tutor, Brahms learned the “Hungarian” style and a number of melodies that may or may not have been common property. Later, more than anything else it would be his own volumes of Hungarian Dances that enabled him to become that rarity, a more or less freelance composer who ate well. (Reményi always claimed that Brahms stole some tunes that the violinist had composed himself and passed off as folk music.6)

If fractious and indifferently successful for a while, their tour was still entertaining enough for the duo, especially for Johannes, who had never been far from home, never played regularly onstage, never been so completely on his own. Years afterward he recalled a couple of concerts in the town of Hildesheim south of Hanover. The first evening was hastily arranged and the audience tiny. At a restaurant afterward, the performers made merry with the patrons, who after dinner followed Reményi like the Pied Piper down the street to the house of an aristocratic lady who had sponsored the concert. They serenaded her with song and Reményi’s improvised fantasia on Bellini’s I Puritani, and the attention all this garnered in a small town brought in a full house for the next concert.7

Of course, Reményi had said at the outset, while we’re in the area we should try for an engagement in Hanover and call on my old schoolmate Josef Joachim. The two virtuosos had studied together in Vienna, both were Hungarian/Jewish in background, and they shared nationalistic enthusiasms. Brahms had an indelible memory of Joachim’s Hamburg performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto five years before, when the violinist was seventeen. Maybe rumors had reached Brahms and Reményi that at the Lower Rhine Music Festival that month, Joachim had caused a furor with the same work. Brahms also remembered his frustration with approaching the famous—when Schumann returned his package in Hamburg. But some concerts might turn up, so why not? They boarded the train for Hanover.

IN MAY 1853 Josef Joachim was about to turn twenty-two and for nearly ten years had been among the preeminent musicians of the age. After studies in Budapest and Vienna he became, at twelve, a protégé of Mendelssohn in Leipzig. Joachim made his first sensation the next year, playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto in London under Mendelssohn’s baton. That greatest of violin concertos had been neglected until Joachim made it unforgettable. He did the same with the Bach unaccompanied